Maybe I'm a fanatic but I love old English. And by old English I mean I love varied vocabulary that conveys a depth of feeling that definitely lacking in our day. This is exemplified in the following quote. It is taken from the book The Character of Jesus, a compilation of sermons given by the Christian scholar Charles Edward Jefferson in 1908. It is writing like the following that makes me breathe more deeply and smile more contentedly.
"The amplitude of Jesus' ideas is evidenced by their perennial freshness and applicability to all kinds of men and conditions. How wonderful it is that Jesus' ideas are broad enough to cover all the nations and all the centuries. Many ideas shrivel and dry up with the lapse of time...But the ideas of Jesus have such breadth that they can cover the world and the ages, and although nineteen centuries have swept away almost everything which was believed and taught in Jesus' day, his ideas are still alive and the very words in which they are expressed seem destined to outlive the stars." (p125)
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