Faith & Spirit Quote by Lafcadio Hearn

Hearn is doing something slyly nationalist while pretending to be merely literary: he crowns the English Bible as the hidden engine of Anglophone culture, then folds Shakespeare into the role of glamorous runner-up. The gambit works because it exploits a familiar hierarchy (art at the top, religion as “outside” literature) and then flips it. By calling the Bible a “work in English literature,” Hearn smuggles scripture into the canon not on theological authority but on sheer stylistic force.

The key phrase is “no exaggeration.” It’s a preemptive shove against the predictable objections: that the Bible is translated, that Shakespeare is incomparable, that “greatest” is too blunt an instrument. Hearn anticipates the eye-roll and answers it before it happens, a rhetorical move that signals he’s less interested in debate than in resetting the terms of cultural prestige.

His real subject is linguistic power, not piety. The Bible’s influence on “written and spoken language” points to how idioms, rhythms, moral vocabulary, and narrative templates seep into everyday life, politics, and law. Shakespeare dazzles; the Bible distributes. One is quoted; the other is memorized, recited, heard at births and deaths, and embedded in communal ritual. That’s why Hearn claims it will outlast even the Bard as a shaping force.

The dated punchline is “the English race,” a turn-of-the-century imperial shortcut that collapses language, nation, and biology into one imagined people. In context, it reveals the anxiety and confidence of a globalizing English: a canon being built to justify its reach, and a sacred text repurposed as cultural infrastructure.