Unless the religious claims of the Bible are again acknowledged, its literary claims will, I think, be given only “mouth honour” and that decreasingly...
It is, if you like to put it that way, not merely a sacred book but a book so remorselessly and continuously sacred that it does not invite, it excludes or repels, the merely aesthetic approach.
You can read it as literature only by a tour de force. You are cutting the wood against the grain, using the tool for a purpose it was not intended to serve.
It demands incessantly to be taken on its own terms: it will not continue to give literary delight very long except to those who go to it for something quite different.
By C.S. Lewis
Compiled in Words to Live By
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