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09000_Field_TCGG T765.txt
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1996-04-10
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Levels of style like levels of exegesis were part of an entire
cultural complex, and exercised the thoughts of the Fathers
with regard to the style of the Bible a great deal. John Donne is
merely rehearsing a patristic commonplace when he writes:
“The Holy Ghost in penning Scriptures delights himself not only
with a propriety, but with a delicacy, and harmony, and melody
of language; with height of Metaphors and other figures, which
may work great impressions on the Readers, and not with
barbarous or triviall, or market or homely language . . . (89)
Ignorance of the continuous operation of the principle of
decorum in styles misled people like R. W. Chambers into
notions of plain simple styles as growing out of some happy
new principle of literary practice. Thus Bede, who wrote in all
styles, is congratulated in the Cambridge History of English
Literature because in his Ecclesiastical History : “It seems to be