You make a potent counterexample with the Bible, upvote.

Besides, Payne was following the usual standards of writing of his day. Literate people of the time got used to text that was dense and relatively opaque compared to most writing today, because that's how people were taught to write. Many people in modern audiences can't parse Shakespeare, and Shakespeare performed for the lower classes of his time, we've simply moved past the point when the modes of communication he used were current.

I think the difference is at least in part that literacy was more limited, so material made for the lowest common denominator ended up shooting for a higher target than that produced in eras of wider media consumption.