Blackwell Reference Online

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The young Pip, hero of Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, had some trouble with religious language. He was fond of reading the family tombstones, he tells us, andAt the time when I stood there in the churchyard … I had just enough learning to be able to spell them out. My construction of their simple meaning was not very correct, for I read ‘wife of the Above’ as a complimentary reference to my father's exaltation to a better world; and if any one of my deceased relations had been referred to as ‘Below’, I have no doubt I should have formed the worst opinions of that member of the family. Neither were my notions of the theological position to which my Catechism bound me at all accurate; for I have a lively remembrance that I supposed my declaration that I was to ‘walk in the same all the days of my life,’ laid me under an obligation always to go through the village from our house in one particular direction, and never to vary it by turning down by the wheelwright's or up by the mill.Pip reads the literal language of the inscriptions as figurative, and understands the figurative language of his catechism as literal. But no wonder the child is confused. No wonder well-educated adults are sometimes confused by religious language, for what is required is far more than an ability to “spell out the words.” Pip's confusion is not so unlike that of the theology student who falls silent ... log in or subscribe to read full text