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THE GREATEST
ENGLISH CLASSIC

A STUDY OF THE
KING JAMES VERSION OF THE BIBLE
AND ITS INFLUENCE ON LIFE
AND LITERATURE

BY

CLELAND BOYD McAFEE, D.D.

AUTHOR OF
"THE GROWING CHURCH" "MOSAIC LAW IN MODERN LIFE"
"STUDIES IN THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT"

[Illustration]

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON




COPYRIGHT. 1912, BY HARPER & BROTHERS

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA




CONTENTS


LECTURE                                                   PAGE

Preface                                                     v

I. Preparing the Way--The English Bible Before
King James                                                  1

II. The Making of the King James Version; Its
Characteristics                                            44

III. The King James Version as English Literature          89

IV. The Influence of the King James Version on
English Literature                                        130

V. The King James Version--Its Influence on English
and American History                                      195

VI. The Bible in the Life of To-day                       241




PREFACE


The lectures included in this volume were prepared at the request of the
Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, and were delivered in the early
part of 1912, under its auspices. They were suggested by the tercentenary
of the King James version of the Bible. The plan adopted led to a
restatement of the history which prepared for the version, and of that
which produced it. It was natural next to point out its principal
characteristics as a piece of literature. Two lectures followed, noting
its influence on literature and on history. The course closed with a
statement and argument regarding the place of the Bible in the life of
to-day.

The reception accorded the lectures at the time of their public delivery,
and the discussion which ensued upon some of the points raised, encourage
the hope that they may be more widely useful.

It is a pleasure to assign to Dr. Franklin W. Hooper, director of the
Institute, whatever credit the work may merit. Certainly it would not have
been undertaken without his kindly urgency.

Cleland Boyd McAfee.

Brooklyn, New York, May, 1912.




THE GREATEST ENGLISH CLASSIC




THE GREATEST ENGLISH CLASSIC




LECTURE I

PREPARING THE WAY--THE ENGLISH BIBLE BEFORE KING JAMES


There are three great Book-religions--Judaism, Christianity, and
Mohammedanism. Other religions have their sacred writings, but they do not
hold them in the same regard as do these three. Buddhism and Confucianism
count their books rather records of their faith than rules for it, history
rather than authoritative sources of belief. The three great
Book-religions yield a measure of authority to their sacred books which
would be utterly foreign to the thought of other faiths.

Yet among the three named are two very distinct attitudes. To the
Mohammedan the language as well as the matter of the Koran is sacred. He
will not permit its translation. Its original Arabic is the only
authoritative tongue in which it can speak. It has been translated into
other tongues, but always by adherents of other faiths, never by its own
believers. The Hebrew and the Christian, on the other hand, but notably
the Christian, have persistently sought to make their Bible speak all
languages at all times.

It is a curious fact that a Book written in one tongue should have come to
its largest power in other languages than its own. The Bible means more
to-day in German and French and English than it does in Hebrew and
Chaldaic and Greek--more even than it ever meant in those languages. There
is nothing just like that in literary history. It is as though Shakespeare
should after a while become negligible for most readers in English, and be
a master of thought in Chinese and Hindustani, or in some language yet
unborn.

We owe this persistent effort to make the Bible speak the language of the
times to a conviction that the particular language used is not the great
thing, that there is something in it which gives it power and value in any
tongue. No book was ever translated so often. Men who have known it in its
earliest tongues have realized that their fellows would not learn these
earliest tongues, and they have set out to make it speak the tongue their
fellows did know. Some have protested that there is impiety in making it
speak the current tongue, and have insisted that men should learn the
earliest speech, or at least accept their knowledge of the Book from those
who did know it. But they have never stopped the movement. They have only
delayed it.

The first movement to make the Scripture speak the current tongue appeared
nearly three centuries before Christ. Most of the Old Testament then
existed in Hebrew. But the Jews had scattered widely. Many had gathered in
Egypt where Alexander the Great had founded the city that bears his name.
At one time a third of the population of the city was Jewish. Many of the
people were passionately loyal to their old religion and its Sacred Book.
But the current tongue there and through most of the civilized world was
Greek, and not Hebrew. As always, there were some who felt that the Book
and its original language were inseparable. Others revealed the
disposition of which we spoke a moment ago, and set out to make the Book
speak the current tongue. For one hundred and fifty years the work went
on, and what we call the Septuagint was completed. There is a pretty
little story which tells how the version got its name, which means the
Seventy--that King Ptolemy Philadelphus, interested in collecting all
sacred books, gathered seventy Hebrew scholars, sent them to the island of
Pharos, shut them up in seventy rooms for seventy days, each making a
translation from the Hebrew into the Greek. When they came out, behold,
their translations were all exactly alike! Several difficulties appear in
that story, one of which is that seventy men should have made the same
mistakes without depending on each other. In addition, it is not
historically supported, and the fact seems to be that the Septuagint was a
long and slow growth, issuing from the impulse to make the Sacred Book
speak the familiar tongue. And, though it was a Greek translation, it
virtually displaced the original, as the English Bible has virtually
displaced the Hebrew and Greek to-day. The Septuagint was the Old
Testament which Paul used. Of one hundred and sixty-eight direct
quotations from the Old Testament in the New nearly all are from the Greek
version--from the translation, and not from the original.

We owe still more to translation. While there is accumulating evidence
that there was spoken in Palestine at that time a colloquial Greek, with
which most people would be familiar, it is yet probable that our Lord
spoke neither Greek nor Hebrew currently, but Aramaic. He knew the Hebrew
Scriptures, of course, as any well-trained lad did; but most of His words
have come down to us in translation. His name, for example, to His Hebrew
mother, was not Jesus, but Joshua; and Jesus is the translation of the
Hebrew Joshua into Greek. We have His words as they were translated by His
disciples into the Greek, in which the New Testament was originally
written.

By the time the writing of the New Testament was completed, say one
hundred years after Christ, while Greek was still current speech, the
Roman Empire was so dominant that the common people were talking Latin
almost as much as Greek, and gradually, because political power was behind
it, the Latin gained on the Greek, and became virtually the speech of the
common people. The movement to make the Bible talk the language of the
time appeared again. It is impossible to say now when the first
translations into Latin were made. Certainly there were some within two
centuries after Christ, and by 250 A.D. a whole Bible in Latin was in
circulation in the Roman Empire. The translation of the New Testament was
from the Greek, of course, but so was that of the Old Testament, and the
Latin versions of the Old Testament were, therefore, translations of a
translation.

There were so many of these versions, and they were so unequal in value,
that there was natural demand for a Latin translation that should be
authoritative. So came into being what we call the Vulgate, whose very
name indicates the desire to get the Bible into the vulgar or common
tongue. Jerome began by revising the earlier Latin translations, but ended
by going back of all translations to the original Greek, and back of the
Septuagint to the original Hebrew wherever he could do so. Fourteen years
he labored, settling himself in Bethlehem, in Palestine, to do his work
the better. Barely four hundred years (404 A.D.) after the birth of Christ
his Latin version appeared. It met a storm of protest for its effort to go
back of the Septuagint, so dominant had the translation become. Jerome
fought for it, and his version won the day, and became the authoritative
Latin translation of the Bible.

For seven or eight centuries it held its sway as the current version
nearest to the tongue of the people. Latin had become the accepted tongue
of the church. There was little general culture, there was little general
acquaintance with the Bible except among the educated. During all that
time there was no real room for a further translation. One of the
writers[1] says: "Medieval England was quite unripe for a Bible in the
mother tongue; while the illiterate majority were in no condition to feel
the want of such a book, the educated minority would be averse to so great
and revolutionary a change." When a man cannot read any writing it really
does not matter to him whether books are in current speech or not, and the
majority of the people for those seven or eight centuries could read
nothing at all. Those who could read anything were apt to be able to read
the Latin.

These centuries added to the conviction of many that the Bible ought not
to become too common, that it should not be read by everybody, that it
required a certain amount of learning to make it safe reading. They came
to feel that it is as important to have an authoritative interpretation of
the Bible as to have the Bible itself. When the movement began to make it
speak the new English tongue, it provoked the most violent opposition.
Latin had been good enough for a millennium; why cheapen the Bible by a
translation? There had grown up a feeling that Jerome himself had been
inspired. He had been canonized, and half the references to him in that
time speak of him as the inspired translator. Criticism of his version was
counted as impious and profane as criticisms of the original text could
possibly have been. It is one of the ironies of history that the version
for which Jerome had to fight, and which was counted a piece of impiety
itself, actually became the ground on which men stood when they fought
against another version, counting anything else but this very version an
impious intrusion!

How early the movement for an English Bible began, it is impossible now to
say. Certainly just before 700 A.D., that first singer of the English
tongue, Caedmon, had learned to paraphrase the Bible. We may recall the
Venerable Bede's charming story of him, and how he came by his power of
interpretation. Bede himself was a child when Caedmon died, and the romance
of the story makes it one of the finest in our literature. Caedmon was a
peasant, a farm laborer in Northumbria working on the lands of the great
Abbey at Whitby. Already he had passed middle life, and no spark of genius
had flashed in him. He loved to go to the festive gatherings and hear the
others sing their improvised poems; but, when the harp came around to him
in due course, he would leave the room, for he could not sing. One night
when he had slipped away from the group in shame and had made his rounds
of the horses and cattle under his care, he fell asleep in the stable
building, and heard a voice in his sleep bidding him sing. When he
declared he could not, the voice still bade him sing. "What shall I sing?"
he asked. "Sing the first beginning of created things." And the words came
to him; and, still dreaming, he sang his first hymn to the Creator. In the
morning he told his story, and the Lady Abbess found that he had the
divine gift. The monks had but to translate to him bits of the Bible out
of the Latin, which he did not understand, into his familiar Anglo-Saxon
tongue, and he would cast it into the rugged Saxon measures which could be
sung by the common people. So far as we can tell, it was so that the Bible
story became current in Anglo-Saxon speech. Bede himself certainly put the
Gospel of John into Anglo-Saxon. At the Bodleian Library, at Oxford, there
is a manuscript of nearly twenty thousand lines, the metrical version of
the Gospel and the Acts, done near 1250 by an Augustinian monk named Orm,
and so called the Ormulum. There were other metrical versions of various
parts of the Bible. Midway between Bede and Orm came Langland's poem, "The
Vision of Piers Plowman," which paraphrased so much of the Scripture.

Yet the fact is that until the last quarter of the fourteenth century
there was no prose version of the Bible in the English language. Indeed,
there was only coming to be an English language. It was gradually
emerging, taking definite shape and form, so that it could be
distinguished from the earlier Norman French, Saxon, and Anglo-Saxon, in
which so much of it is rooted.

As soon as the language grew definite enough, it was inevitable that two
things should come to pass. First, that some men would attempt to make a
colloquial version of the Bible; and, secondly, that others would oppose
it. One can count with all confidence on these two groups of men, marching
through history like the animals into the ark, two and two. Some men
propose, others oppose. They are built on those lines.

We are more concerned with the men who made the versions; but we must
think a moment of the others. One of his contemporaries, Knighton, may
speak for all in his saying of Wiclif, that he had, to be sure, translated
the Gospel into the Anglic tongue, but that it had thereby been made
vulgar by him, and more open to the reading of laymen and women than it
usually is to the knowledge of lettered and intelligent clergy, and "thus
the pearl is cast abroad and trodden under the feet of swine"; and, that
we may not be in doubt who are the swine, he adds: "The jewel of the
Church is turned into the common sport of the people."

But two strong impulses drive thoughtful men to any effort that will
secure wide knowledge of the Bible. One is their love of the Bible and
their belief in it; but the other, dominant then and now, is a sense of
the need of their own time. It cannot be too strongly urged that the two
great pioneers of English Bible translation, Wiclif and Tindale, more than
a century apart, were chiefly moved to their work by social conditions. No
one could read the literature of the times of which we are speaking
without smiling at our assumption that we are the first who have cared for
social needs. We talk about the past as the age of the individual, and the
present as the social age. Our fathers, we say, cared only to be saved
themselves, and had no concern for the evils of society. They believed in
rescuing one here and another there, while we have come to see the wisdom
of correcting the conditions that ruin men, and so saving men in the mass.
There must be some basis of truth for that, since we say it so
confidently; but it can be much over-accented. There were many of our
fathers, and of our grandfathers, who were mightily concerned with the
mass of people, and looked as carefully as we do for a corrective of
social evils. Wiclif, in the late fourteenth century, and Tindale, in the
early sixteenth, were two such men. The first English translations of the
Bible were fruits of the social impulse.

Wiclif was impressed with the chasm that was growing between the church
and the people, and felt that a wider and fuller knowledge of the Bible
would be helpful for the closing of the chasm. It is a familiar remark of
Miss Jane Addams that the cure for the evils of democracy is more
democracy. Wiclif believed that the cure for the evils of religion is more
religion, more intelligent religion. He found a considerable feeling that
the best things in religion ought to be kept from most people, since they
could not be trusted to understand them. His own feeling was that the best
things in religion are exactly the things most people ought to know most
about; that people had better handle the Bible carelessly, mistakenly,
than be shut out from it by any means whatever. We owe the first English
translation to a faith that the Bible is a book of emancipation for the
mind and for the political life.

John Wiclif himself was a scholar of Oxford, master of that famous Balliol
College which has had such a list of distinguished masters. He was an
adviser of Edward III. Twenty years after his death a younger contemporary
(W. Thorpe) said that "he was considered by many to be the most holy of
all the men of his age. He was of emaciated frame, spare, and well nigh
destitute of strength. He was absolutely blameless in his conduct." And
even that same Knighton who accused him of casting the Church's pearl
before swine says that in philosophy "he came to be reckoned inferior to
none of his time."

But it was not at Oxford that he came to know common life so well and to
sense the need for a new social influence. He came nearer to it when he
was rector of the parish at Lutterworth. As scholar and rector he set
going the two great movements which leave his name in history. One was his
securing, training, and sending out a band of itinerant preachers or "poor
priests" to gather the people in fields and byways and to preach the
simple truths of the Christian religion. They were unpaid, and lived by
the kindness of the common people. They came to be called Lollards,
though the origin of the name is obscure. Their followers received the
same name. A few years after Wiclif's death an enemy bitterly observed
that if you met any two men one was sure to be a Lollard. It was the
"first time in English history that an appeal had been made to the people
instead of the scholars." Religion was to be made rather a matter of
practical life than of dogma or of ritual. The "poor priests" in their
cheap brown robes became a mighty religious force, and evoked opposition
from the Church powers. A generation after Wiclif's death they had become
a mighty political force in the controversy between the King and the Pope.
As late as 1521 five hundred Lollards were arrested in London by the
bishop.[2] Wiclif's purpose, however, was to reach and help the common
people with the simpler, and therefore the most fundamental, truths of
religion.

The other movement which marks Wiclif's name concerns us more; but it was
connected with the first. He set out to give the common people the full
text of the Bible for their common use, and to encourage them not only in
reading it, if already they could read, but in learning to read that they
might read it. Tennyson compares the village of Lutterworth to that of
Bethlehem, on the ground that if Christ, the Word of God, was born at
Bethlehem, the Word of Life was born again at Lutterworth.[3] The
translation was from the Vulgate, and Wiclif probably did little of the
actual work himself, yet it is all his work. And in 1382, more than five
centuries ago, there appeared the first complete English version of the
Bible. Wiclif made it the people's Book, and the English people were the
first of the modern nations to whom the Bible as a whole was given in
their own familiar tongue. Once it got into their hands they have never
let it be taken entirely away.

Of course, all this was before the days of printing, and copies were made
by hand only. Yet there were very many of them. One hundred and fifty
manuscripts, in whole or in part, are extant still, a score of them of the
original version, the others of the revision at once undertaken by John
Purvey, Wiclif's disciple. The copies belonging to Edward VI. and Queen
Elizabeth are both still in existence, and both show much use. Twenty
years after it was completed copies were counted very valuable, though
they were very numerous. It was not uncommon for a single complete
manuscript copy of the Wiclif version to be sold for one hundred and fifty
or two hundred dollars, and Foxe, whose _Book of Martyrs_ we used to read
as children, tells that a load of hay was given for the use of a New
Testament one hour a day.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the influence of this gift to the
English people. It constitutes the standard of Middle English. Chaucer and
Wiclif stood side by side. It is true that Chaucer himself accepted
Wiclif's teaching, and some of the wise men think that the "parson" of
whom he speaks so finely as one who taught the lore of Christ and His
apostles twelve, but first followed it himself, was Wiclif. But the
version had far more than literary influence; it had tremendous power in
keeping alive in England that spirit of free inquiry which is the only
safeguard of free institutions. Here was the entire source of the
Christian faith available for the judgment of common men, and they became
at once judges of religious and political dogma. Dr. Ladd thinks it was
not the reading of the Bible which produced the Reformation; it was the
Reformation itself which procured the reading of the Bible.[4] But Dr.
Rashdall and Professor Pollard and others are right when they insist that
the English Reformation received less from Luther than from the secret
reading of the Scripture over the whole country. What we call the English
spirit of free inquiry was fostered and developed by Wiclif and his
Lollards with the English Scripture in their hands. Out of it has grown as
out of no other one root the freedom of the English and American people.

This work of Wiclif deserves the time we have given it because it asserted
a principle for the English people. There was much yet to be done before
entire freedom was gained. At Oxford, in the Convocation of 1408, it was
solemnly voted: "We decree and ordain that no man hereafter by his own
authority translate any text of the Scripture into English, or any other
tongue, by way of a book, pamphlet, or other treatise; but that no man
read any such book, pamphlet, or treatise now lately composed in the time
of John Wiclif ... until the said translation be approved by the orderly
of the place." But it was too late. It is always too late to overtake a
liberating idea once it gets free. Tolstoi tells of Batenkoff, the Russian
nihilist, that after he was seized and confined in his cell he was heard
to laugh loudly; and, when they asked him the cause of his mirth, he said
that he could not fail to be amused at the absurdity of the situation.
"They have caught me," he said, "and shut me up here; but my ideas are out
yonder in the streets and in the fields, absolutely free. They cannot
overtake them." It was already too late, twenty years after Wiclif's
version was available, to stop the English people in their search for
religious truth.

In the century just after the Wiclif translation, two great events
occurred which bore heavily on the spread of the Bible. One was the
revival of learning, which made popular again the study of the classics
and the classical languages. Critical and exact Greek scholarship became
again a possibility. Remember that Wiclif did not know Greek nor Hebrew,
did not need to know them to be the foremost scholar of Oxford in the
fourteenth century. Even as late as 1502 there was no professor of Greek
at the proud University of Erfurt when Luther was a student there. It was
after he became a doctor of divinity and a university professor that he
learned Greek in order to be a better Bible student, and his young friend
Philip Melancthon was the first to teach Greek in the University.[5] But
under the influence of Erasmus and his kind, with their new insistence on
classical learning, there came necessarily a new appraisal of the Vulgate
as a translation of the original Bible. For a thousand years there had
been no new study of the original Bible languages in Europe. The Latin of
the Vulgate had become as sacred as the Book itself. But the revival of
learning threw scholarship back on the sources of the text. Erasmus and
others published versions of the Greek Testament which were disturbing to
the Vulgate as a final version.

The other great event of that same century was the invention of printing
with movable type. It was in 1455 that Gutenberg printed his first book,
an edition of the Vulgate, now called the Mazarin Bible. The bearing of
the invention on the spread of common knowledge is beyond description. It
is rather late to be praising the art of printing, and we need spend
little time doing so; but one can see instantly how it affected the use of
the Bible. It made it worth while to learn to read--there would be
something to read. It made it worth while to write--there would be some
one to read what was written.

One hundred years exactly after the death of Wiclif, William Tindale was
born. He was eight years old when Columbus discovered America. He had
already taken a degree at Oxford, and was a student in Cambridge when
Luther posted his theses at Wittenburg. Erasmus either was a teacher at
Cambridge when Tindale was a student there, or had just left. Sir Thomas
More and Erasmus were close friends, and More's _Utopia_ and Erasmus's
Greek New Testament appeared the same year, probably while Tindale was a
student at Cambridge.

But he came at a troubled time. The new learning had no power to deepen or
strengthen the moral life of the people. It could not make religion a
vital thing. Morality and religion were far separated. The priests and
curates were densely ignorant. We need not ask Tindale what was the
condition. Ask Bellarmine, a cardinal of the Church: "Some years before
the rise of the Lutheran heresy there was almost an entire abandonment of
equity in ecclesiastical judgments; in morals, no discipline; in sacred
literature, no erudition; in divine things, no reverence; religion was
almost extinct." Or ask Erasmus, who never broke with the Church: "What
man of real piety does not perceive with sighs that this is far the most
corrupt of all ages? When did iniquity abound with more licentiousness?
When was charity so cold?" And, as a century before, Wiclif had felt the
social need for a popular version of the Bible, so William Tindale felt it
now. He saw the need as great among the clergy of the time as among the
laity. In one of his writings he says: "If you will not let the layman
have the word of God in his mother tongue, yet let the priests have it,
which for the great part of them do understand no Latin at all, but sing
and patter all day with the lips only that which the heart understandeth
not."[6] So bad was the case that it was not corrected within a whole
generation. Forty years after Tindale's version was published, the Bishop
of Gloucester, Hooper by name, made an examination of the clergy of his
diocese. There were 311 of them. He found 168, more than half, unable to
repeat the Ten Commandments; 31 who did not even know where they could be
found; 40 who could not repeat the Lord's Prayer; and nearly as many who
did not know where it originated; yet they were all in regular standing as
clergy in the diocese of Gloucester. The need was keen enough.

About 1523 Tindale began to cast the Scriptures into the current English.
He set out to London fully expecting to find support and encouragement
there, but he found neither. He found, as he once said, that there was no
room in the palace of the Bishop of London to translate the New Testament;
indeed, that there was no place to do it in all England. A wealthy London
merchant subsidized him with the munificent gift of ten pounds, with which
he went across the Channel to Hamburg; and there and elsewhere on the
Continent, where he could be hid, he brought his translation to
completion. Printing facilities were greater on the Continent than in
England; but there was such opposition to his work that very few copies of
the several editions of which we know can still be found. Tindale was
compelled to flee at one time with a few printed sheets and complete his
work on another press. Several times copies of his books were solemnly
burned, and his own life was frequently in danger.

There is one amusing story which tells how money came to free Tindale from
heavy debt and prepare the way for more Bibles. The Bishop of London,
Tunstall, was set on destroying copies of the English New Testament. He
therefore made a bargain with a merchant of Antwerp, Packington, to
secure them for him. Packington was a friend of Tindale, and went to him
forthwith, saying: "William, I know thou art a poor man, and I have gotten
thee a merchant for thy books." "Who?" asked Tindale. "The Bishop of
London." "Ah, but he will burn them." "So he will, but you will have the
money." And it all came out as it was planned; the Bishop of London had
the books, Packington had the thanks, Tindale had the money, the debt was
paid, and the new edition was soon ready. The old document, from which I
am quoting, adds that the Bishop thought he had God by the toe when,
indeed, he found afterward that he had the devil by the fist.[7]

The final revision of the Tindale translations was published in 1534, and
that becomes the notable year of his life. In two years he was put to
death by strangling, and his body was burned. When we remember that this
was done with the joint power of Church and State, we realize some of the
odds against which he worked.

Spite of his odds, however, Tindale is the real father of our King James
version. About eighty per cent. of his Old Testament and ninety per cent.
of his New Testament have been transferred to our version. In the
Beatitudes, for example, five are word for word in the two versions, while
the other three are only slightly changed.[8] Dr. Davidson has calculated
that nine-tenths of the words in the shorter New Testament epistles are
Tindale's, and in the longer epistles like the Hebrews five-sixths are
his. Froude's estimate is fair: "Of the translation itself, though since
that time it has been many times revised and altered, we may say that it
is substantially the Bible with which we are familiar. The peculiar genius
which breathes through it, the mingled tenderness and majesty, the Saxon
simplicity, the preternatural grandeur, unequaled, unapproached, in the
attempted improvements of modern scholars, all are here, and bear the
impress of the mind of one man, William Tindale."[9]

We said a moment ago that Wiclif's translation was the standard of Middle
English. It is time to add that Tindale's version "fixed our standard
English once for all, and brought it finally into every English home." The
revisers of 1881 declared that while the authorized version was the work
of many hands, the foundation of it was laid by Tindale, and that the
versions that followed it were substantially reproductions of Tindale's,
or revisions of versions which were themselves almost entirely based on
it.

There was every reason why it should be a worthy version. For one thing,
it was the first translation into English from the original Hebrew and
Greek. Wiclif's had been from the Latin. For Tindale there were available
two new and critical Greek Testaments, that of Erasmus and the so-called
Complutensian, though he used that of Erasmus chiefly. There was also
available a carefully prepared Hebrew Old Testament. For another thing, it
was the first version which could be printed, and so be subject to easy
and immediate correction and revision. Then also, Tindale himself was a
great scholar in the languages. He was "so skilled in the seven languages,
Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish, English, and French, that,
whichever he spoke, you would suppose it was his native tongue."[10] Nor
was his spirit in the work controversial. I say his "spirit in the work"
with care. They were controversial times, and Tindale took his share in
the verbal warfare. When, for example, there was objection to making any
English version because "the language was so rude that the Bible could not
be intelligently translated into it," Tindale replied: "It is not so rude
as they are false liars. For the Greek tongue agreeth more with the
English than with the Latin, a thousand parts better may it be translated
into the English than into the Latin."[11] And when a high church
dignitary protested to Tindale against making the Bible so common, he
replied: "If God spare my life, ere many years I will cause a boy that
driveth a plow shall know more of the Scriptures than thou dost." And
while that was not saying much for the plowboy, it was saying a good deal
to the dignitary. In language, Tindale was controversial enough, but in
his spirit, in making his version, there was no element of controversy.
For such reasons as these we might expect the version to be valuable.

All this while, and especially between the time when Tindale first
published his New Testament and the time they burned him for doing so, an
interesting change was going on in England. The King was Henry VIII., who
was by no means a willing Protestant. As Luther's work appeared, it was
this same Henry who wrote the pamphlet against him during the Diet of
Worms, and on the ground of this pamphlet, with its loyal support of the
Church against Luther, he received from the Roman pontiff the title
"Defender of the Faith," which the kings of England still wear. And yet
under this king this strange succession of dates can be given. Notice them
closely. In 1526 Tindale's New Testament was burned at St. Paul's by the
Bishop of London; ten years later, 1536, Tindale himself was burned with
the knowledge and connivance of the English government; and yet, one year
later, 1537, two versions of the Bible in English, three-quarters of which
were the work of Tindale, were licensed for public use by the King of
England, and were required to be made available for the people! Eleven
years after the New Testament was burned, one year after Tindale was
burned, that crown was set on his work! What brought this about?

Three facts help to explain it. First, the recent years of Bible
translation were having their weight. The fugitive copies of the Bible
were doing their work. Spite of the sharp opposition fifty thousand copies
of Tindale's various editions had actually been published and circulated.
Men were reading them; they were approving them. The more they read, the
less reason they saw for hiding the Book from the people. Why should it
not be made common and free? There was strong Lutheran opinion in the
universities. It was already a custom for English teachers to go to
Germany for minute scholarship. They came back with German Bibles in
Luther's version and with Greek Testaments, and the young scholars who
were being raised up felt the influence, consciously or unconsciously, of
the free use of the Bible which ruled in many German universities.

The second fact that helps to explain the sudden change of attitude toward
the Bible is this: the people of England were never willingly ruled from
without, religiously or politically. There has recently been a
considerable controversy over the history of the Established Church of
England, whether it has always been an independent church or was at one
time officially a part of the Roman Church. That is a matter for
ecclesiastical history to determine. The foundation fact, however, is as
I worded it a moment ago: the people of England were never willingly
ruled from without, religiously or politically. They were sometimes ruled
from without; but they were either indifferent to it at the time or
rebellious against it. Those who did think claimed the right to think for
themselves. The Scotch of the north were peculiarly so, but the English of
the south claimed the same right. There has always been an immense
contrast between the two sides of the British Channel. The French people
during all those years were deeply loyal to a foreign religious
government. The English people were never so, not in the days of the
fullest Roman supremacy. They always demanded at least a form of home
government. That made England a congenial home for the Protestant spirit,
which claimed the right to independent study of the sources of religion
and independent judgment regarding them. It was only a continuance of the
spirit of Wiclif and the Lollards. The spirit in a nation lives long,
especially when it is passed down by tradition. Those were not the days of
newspapers. They were instead the days of great meetings, more important
still of small family gatherings, where the memory of the older men was
called into use, and where boys and girls drank in eagerly the traditions
of their own country as expressed in the great events of their history.
Newspapers never can fully take the place of those gatherings, for they do
not bring men together to feel the thrill of the story that is told. It
must be remembered that the entire population of England at that time was
only about three millions. And that old spirit of independence was
strongly at work in the middle-class villages and among the merchants, and
they were a ruling and dominant class. That was second, that in those ten
years there asserted itself the age-long unwillingness of the English
people to be ruled from without.

The third fact which must be taken into account to explain this remarkable
change of front of the public English life is Henry VIII. himself. There
is much about him that no country would willingly claim. He was the most
habitual bridegroom in English history; he had an almost confirmed habit
of beheading his wives or otherwise ridding himself of them. Yet many
traits made him a typical outstanding Englishman. He had the
characteristic spirit of independence, the resentment of foreign control,
satisfaction with his own land, the feeling that of course it is the best
land. There are no people in the world so well satisfied with their own
country as the people of England or the British Isles. They are critical
of many things in their own government until they begin to compare it with
other countries; they must make their changes on their own lines. The
pamphlet of Henry VIII., which won him the title of Defender of the Faith,
praised the pope; and, though Sir Thomas More urged him to change his
expressions lest he should live to regret them, he would not change them.
But that was while the pope was serving his wishes and what he felt was
England's good.

There arose presently the question, or the several questions, about his
marriage. It sheds no glory on Henry VIII. that they arose as they did;
but his treatment of them must not be mistaken. He was concerned to have
his marriage to Anne Boleyn confirmed, and there are some who think he was
honest in believing it ought to be confirmed, though we need not believe
that. What happened was that for the first time Henry VIII. found that as
sovereign of England he must take commands from a foreign power, a power
exercising temporal sovereignty exactly as he did, but adding to it a
claim to spiritual power, a claim to determine his conduct for him and to
absolve his people from loyalty to him if he was not obedient. It arose
over the question of his divorce, but it might have arisen over anything
else. It was limitation on his sovereignty in England. And he let it be
seen that all questions that pertain to England were to be settled in
England, and not in another land. He would rather have a matter settled
wrong in England than settled right elsewhere. That is how he claimed to
be head of the English Church. The people back of him had always held to
the belief that they were governed from within, though they were linked to
religion from without. He executed their theory. That assertion of English
sovereignty came during the eventful years of which we are speaking.

Here, then, are our great facts. First, thoughtful opinion wanted the
Bible made available, and at a convention of bishops and university men
the King was requested to secure the issuance of a proper translation.
Secondly, the people wanted it, the more because it would gratify their
English instinct of independent judgment in matters of religion. Thirdly,
the King granted it without yielding his personal religious position, in
assertion of his human sovereignty within his own realm.

So England awoke one morning in 1537 to discover that it had a translation
of the Bible, two of them actually, open to its use, the very thing that
had been forbidden yesterday! And that, one year after Tindale had been
burned in loyal France for issuing an English translation! Two versions
were now authorized and made available. What were they? That of Miles
Coverdale, which had been issued secretly two years before, and that known
as the "Matthew" Bible, though the name has no significance, issued within
a year. Details are not to our purpose. Neither was an independent work,
but was made largely from the Latin and the German, and much influenced by
Tindale. Coverdale was a Yorkshire man like Wiclif, feminine in his mental
cast as Tindale was masculine. Coverdale made his translation because he
loved books; Tindale because he felt driven to it. But now the way was
clear, and other editions appeared. It is natural to name one or two of
the more notable ones.

There appeared what is known as the Great Bible in 1539. It was only
another version made by Coverdale on the basis of the Matthew version, but
corrected by more accurate knowledge. There is an interesting romance of
its publication. The presses of England were not adequate for the great
work planned; it was to be a marvel of typography. So the consent of King
Francis was gained to have it printed in France, and Coverdale was sent
as a special ambassador to oversee it. He was in dread of the Inquisition,
which was in vogue at the time, and sent off his printed sheets to England
as rapidly as possible. Suddenly one day the order of confiscation came
from the Inquisitor-General. Only Coverdale's official position as
representing the King saved his own life. As for the printed sheets on
which so much depended, they seemed doomed. But in the nick of time a
dealer appeared at the printing-house and purchased four great vats full
of waste paper which he shipped to England--when it was found that the
waste paper was those printed sheets. The presses and the printers were
all loyal to England, and the edition was finally completed. The Great
Bible was issued to meet a decree that each church should make available
in some convenient place the largest possible copy of the whole Bible,
where all the parishioners could have access to it and read it at their
will. The version gets its name solely from the size of the volume. That
decree dates 1538, twelve years after Tindale's books were burned, and two
years after he was burned! The installation of these great books caused
tremendous excitement--crowds gathered everywhere. Bishop Bonner caused
six copies of the great volume to be located wisely throughout St.
Paul's. He found it difficult to make people leave them during the
sermons. He was so often interrupted by voices reading to a group, and by
the discussions that ensued, that he threatened to have them taken out
during the service if people would not be quiet. The Great Bible appeared
in seven editions in two years, and continued in recognized power for
thirty years. Much of the present English prayer-book is taken from it.

But this liberty was so sudden that the people naturally abused it. Henry
became vexed because the sacred words "were disputed, rimed, sung, and
jangled in every ale-house." There had grown up a series of wild ballads
and ribald songs in contempt of "the old faith," while it was not really
the old faith which was in dispute, but only foreign control of English
faith. They had mistaken Henry's meaning. So Henry began to put
restrictions on the use of the Bible. There were to be no notes or
annotations in any versions, and those that existed were to be blacked
out. Only the upper classes were to be allowed to possess a Bible.
Finally, the year before his death, all versions were prohibited except
the Great Bible, whose cost and size precluded secret use. The decree led
to another great burning of Bibles in 1546--Tindale, Coverdale,
Matthew--all but the Great Bible. The leading religious reformers took
flight and fled to European Protestant towns like Frankfort and
Strassburg. But the Bible remained. Henry VIII. died. The Bible lived on.

Under Edward VI., the boy king, coming to the throne at nine and dying at
fifteen, the regency with Cranmer at its head earned its bad name. But
while its members were shamelessly despoiling churches and enriching
themselves they did one great service for the Bible. They cast off all
restrictions on its translation and publication. The order for a Great
Bible in every church was renewed, and there was to be added to it a copy
of Erasmus's paraphrase of the four gospels. Nearly fifty editions of the
Bible, in whole or in part, appeared in those six years.

And that was fortunate, for then came Mary--and the deluge. Of course, she
again gave in the nominal allegiance of England to the Roman control. But
she utterly missed the spirit of the people. They were weary with the
excesses of rabid Protestantism; but they were by no means ready to admit
the principle of foreign control in religious matters. They might have
been willing, many of them, that the use of the Bible should be
restricted, if it were done by their own sovereign. They were not willing
that another sovereign should restrict them. So the secret use of the
Bible increased. Martyr fires were kindled, but by the light of them the
people read their Bibles more eagerly. And this very persecution led to
one of the best of the early versions of the Bible, indirectly even to the
King James version.

The flower of English Protestant scholarship was driven into exile, and
found its way to Frankfort and Geneva again. There the spirit of
scholarship was untrammeled; there they found material for scholarly study
of the Bible, and there they made and published a new version of the Bible
in English, by all means the best that had been made. In later years,
under Elizabeth, it drove the Great Bible off the field by sheer power of
excellence. During her reign sixty editions of it appeared. This was the
version called the Genevan Bible. It made several changes that are
familiar to us. For one thing, in the Genevan edition of 1560 first
appeared our familiar division into verses. The chapter division was made
three centuries earlier; but the verses belong to the Genevan version, and
are divided to make the Book suitable for responsive use and for readier
reference. It was taken in large part from the work of Robert Stephens,
who had divided the Greek Testament into verses, ten years earlier, during
a journey which he was compelled to make between Paris and Lyons. The
Genevan version also abandoned the old black letter, and used the Roman
type with which we are familiar. It had full notes on hard passages, which
notes, as we shall see, helped to produce the King James version. The work
itself was completed after the accession of Elizabeth, when most of the
religious leaders had returned to England from their exile under Mary.

Elizabeth herself was not an ardent Protestant, not ardent at all
religiously, but an ardent Englishwoman. She understood her people, and
while she prided herself on being the "Guardian of the Middle Way," she
did not make the mistake of submitting her sovereignty to foreign
supervision. Probably Elizabeth always counted herself personally a
Catholic, but not politically subject to the Roman pontiff. She had no
wish to offend other Catholic powers; but she was determined to develop a
strong national spirit and to allow religious differences to exist if they
would be peaceful. The dramatic scene which was enacted at the time of
her coronation procession was typical of her spirit. As the procession
passed down Cheapside, a venerable old man, representing Time, with a
little child beside him representing Truth--Time always old, Truth always
young--presented the Queen with a copy of the Scriptures, which she
accepted, promising to read them diligently.

Presently it was found that two versions of the Bible were taking the
field, the old Great Bible and the new Genevan Bible. On all accounts the
Genevan was the better and was driving out its rival. Yet there could be
no hope of gaining the approval of Elizabeth for the Genevan Bible. For
one thing, John Knox had been a party to its preparation; so had Calvin.
Elizabeth detested them both, especially Knox. For another thing, its
notes were not favorable to royal sovereignty, but smacked so much of
popular government as to be offensive. For another thing, though it had
been made mostly by her own people, it had been made in a foreign land,
and was under suspicion on that account. The result was that Elizabeth's
archbishop, Parker, set out to have an authorized version made, selected a
revision committee, with instructions to follow wherever possible the
Great Bible, to avoid bitter notes, and to make such a version that it
might be freely, easily, and naturally read. The result is known as the
Bishops' Bible. It was issued in Elizabeth's tenth year (1568), but there
is no record that she ever noticed it, though Parker sent her a copy from
his sick-bed. The Bishops' Bible shows the influence of the Genevan Bible
in many ways, though it gives no credit for that. It is not of equal
merit; it was expensive, too cumbersome, and often unscholarly. Only its
official standing gave it life, and after forty years, in nineteen
editions, it was no longer published.

Naming one other English version will complete the series of facts
necessary for the consideration of the forming of the King James version.
It will be remembered that all the English versions of the Bible thus far
mentioned were the work of men either already out of favor with the Roman
pontiff, or speedily put out of favor on that account. Thirty years after
his death, Wiclif's bones were taken up and burned; Tindale was burned.
Coverdale's version and the Great Bible were the product of the period
when Henry VIII. was under the ban. The Genevan Bible was the work of
refugees, and the Bishops' Bible was prepared when Elizabeth had been
excommunicated. That fact seemed to many loyal Roman churchmen to put the
Church in a false light. It must be made clear that its opposition was not
to the Bible, not even to popular use and possession of the Bible, but
only to unauthorized, even incorrect, versions. So there came about the
Douai version, instigated by Gregory Martin, and prepared in some sense as
an answer to the Genevan version and its strongly anti-papal notes. It was
the work of English scholars connected with the University of Douai. The
New Testament was issued at Rheims in 1582, and the whole Bible in 1609,
just before our King James version. It is made, not from the Hebrew and
the Greek, though it refers to both, but from the Vulgate. The result is
that the Old Testament of the Douai version is a translation into English
from the Latin, which in large part is a translation into Latin from the
Greek Septuagint, which in turn is a translation into Greek from the
Hebrew. Yet scholars are scholars, and it shows marked influence of the
Genevan version, and, indeed, of other English versions. Its notes were
strongly anti-Protestant, and in its preface it explains its existence by
saying that Protestants have been guilty of "casting the holy to dogs and
pearls to hogs."

The version is not in the direct line of the ascent of the familiar
version, and needs no elaborate description. Its purpose was
controversial; it did not go to available sources; its English was not
colloquial, but ecclesiastical. For example, in the Lord's Prayer we read:
"Give us this day our supersubstantial bread," instead of "our daily
bread." In Hebrews xiii:17, the version reads, "Obey your prelates and be
subject unto them." In Luke iii:3, John came "preaching the baptism of
penance." In Psalm xxiii:5, where we read, "My cup runneth over," the
Douai version reads, "My chalice which inebriateth me, how goodly it is."
There is a careful retention of ecclesiastical terms, and an explanation
of the passages on which Protestants had come to differ rather sharply
from their Roman brethren, as in the matter of the taking of the cup by
the people, and elsewhere.

Yet it is only fair to remember that this much answer was made to the
versions which were preparing the way for the greatest version of them
all, and when the time came for the making of that version, and the helps
were gathered together, the Douai was frankly placed among them. It is a
peculiar irony of fate that while the purpose of Gregory Martin was to
check the translation of the Bible by the Protestants, the only effect of
his work was to advance and improve that translation.

At last, as we shall see in our next study, the way was cleared for a free
and open setting of the Bible into English. The way had been beset with
struggle, marked with blood, lighted by martyr fires. Wiclif and Purvey,
Tindale and Coverdale, the refugees at Geneva and the Bishops at London,
all had trod that way. Kings had fought them or had favored them; it was
all one; they had gone on. Loyal zest for their Book and loving zeal for
the common people had held them to the path. Now it had become a highway
open to all men. And right worthy were the feet which were soon treading
it.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Hoare, _Evolution of the English Bible_, p. 39.

[2] Muir, _Our Grand Old Bible_, p. 24.

[3] "Not least art thou, thou little Bethlehem
    In Judah, for in thee the Lord was born;
    Nor thou in Britain, little Lutterworth,
    Least, for in thee the word was born again."
          --_Sir John Oldcastle._

[4] _What Is the Bible?_, p. 45.

[5] McGiffert, _Martin Luther_.

[6] _Obedience of a Christian Man._

[7] Pollard, _Records of the English Bible_, p. 151.

[8] The fourth reads in his version, "Blessed are they which hunger and
thirst for righteousness"; the seventh, "Blessed are the maintainers of
peace"; the eighth, "Blessed are they which suffer persecution for
righteousness' sake."

[9] _History of England_, end of chap. xii.

[10] Herman Buschius.

[11] This will mean the more to us when we realize that the literary men
of the day despised the English tongue. Sir Thomas More wrote his _Utopia_
in Latin, because otherwise educated men would not deign to read it. Years
later Roger Ascham apologized for writing one of his works in English.
Putting the Bible into current English impressed these literary men very
much as we would be impressed by putting the Bible into current slang.




LECTURE II

THE MAKING OF THE KING JAMES VERSION; ITS CHARACTERISTICS


Early in January, 1604, men were making their way along the poor English
highways, by coach and carrier, to the Hampton Court Palace of the new
English king. They were coming from the cathedral towns, from the
universities, from the larger cities. Many were Church dignitaries, many
were scholars, some were Puritans, all were loyal Englishmen, and they
were gathering in response to a call for a conference with the king, James
I. They were divided in sentiment, these men, and those who hoped most
from the conference were doomed to complete disappointment. Not one among
them, not the King, had the slightest purpose that the conference should
do what proved to be its only real service. Some of the men, grave and
earnest, were coming to present their petitions to the King, others were
coming to oppose their petitions; the King meant to deny them and to
harry the petitioners. And everything came out as it had been planned. Yet
the largest service of the conference, the only real service, was in no
one's mind, for it was at Hampton Court, on the last day of the conference
between James and the churchmen, January 18, 1604, that the first formal
step was taken toward the making of the so-called Authorized Version of
the English Bible. If there are such things as accidents, this great
enterprise began in an accident. But the outcome of the accident, the
volume that resulted, is "allowed by all competent authorities to be the
first [that is, the chief] English classic," if our Professor Cook, of
Yale, may speak; "is universally accepted as a literary masterpiece, as
the noblest and most beautiful Book in the world, which has exercised an
incalculable influence upon religion, upon manners, upon literature, and
upon character," if the Balliol College scholar Hoare can be trusted; and
has "made the English language," if Professor March is right. The purpose
of this study is to show how that accident occurred, and what immediately
came from it.

       *       *       *       *       *

With the death of Elizabeth the Tudor line of sovereigns died out. The
collateral Stuart line, descending directly from Henry VII., naturally
succeeded to the throne, and James VI. of Scotland made his royal progress
to the English capital and became James I. of England. In him appears the
first of that Stuart line during whose reign great changes were to occur.
Every one in the line held strongly to the dogma of the divine right of
kings, yet under that line the English people transferred sovereignty from
the king to Parliament.[12] Fortunately for history, and for the progress
of popular government, the Stuart line had no forceful figures in it.
Macaulay thinks it would have been fatal to English liberty if they had
been able kings. It was easier to take so dangerous a weapon as the divine
right of kings from weak hands than from strong ones. So it was that
though James came out of Scotland to assert his divine and arbitrary right
as sovereign, by the time Queen Anne died, closing the Stuart line and
giving way to the Hanoverian, the real sovereignty had passed into the
hands of Parliament.

But the royal traveler, coming from Edinburgh to London, is interesting on
his own account--interesting at this distance. He is thirty-seven years
old, and ought to be in the beginning of his prime. He is a little over
middle height; loves a good horse, though he is an ungainly rider, and has
fallen off his horse three or four times during his royal progress; is a
heavy drinker of the liquors of the period, with horribly coarse, even
gross manners. Macaulay is very severe with him. He says that "his
cowardice, his childishness, his pedantry, his ungainly person and
manners, his provincial accent, made him an object of derision. Even in
his virtues and accomplishments there was something eminently
unkingly."[13] It seemed too bad that "royalty should be exhibited to the
world stammering, slobbering, shedding unmanly tears, trembling at the
drawn sword, and talking in the style alternately of a buffoon and of a
pedagogue." That is truly not an attractive picture. But there is
something on the other side. John Richard Green puts both sides: "His big
head, his slobbering tongue, his quilted clothes, his rickety legs stood
out in as grotesque a contrast with all that men recalled of Henry and
Elizabeth as his gabble and rhodomontade, his want of personal dignity,
his buffoonery, his coarseness of speech, his pedantry, his contemptible
cowardice. Under this ridiculous exterior, however, lay a man of much
natural ability, a ripe scholar with a considerable fund of shrewdness, of
mother wit and ready repartee."[14]

Some good traits he must have had. He did win some men to him. As some one
has said, "You could love him; you could despise him; you could not hate
him." He could say some witty and striking things. For example, when he
was urging the formal union of Scotland and England, and it was opposed,
he said: "But I am the husband, and the whole island is my wife. I hope no
one will be so unreasonable as to suppose that I, that am a Christian king
under the Gospel, should be a polygamist and husband to two wives."[15]
After the conference of which we have been speaking, he wrote to a friend
in Scotland: "I have had a revel with the Puritans and have peppered them
soundly." As indeed he had. Then, in some sense at least, "James was a
born theologian." He had studied the Bible in some form from childhood;
one of the first things we hear of his doing is the writing of a
paraphrase on the book of the Revelation. In his talk he made easy and
free use of Scripture quotations. To be sure, his knowledge, on which he
prided himself unconscionably, was shallow and pedantic. Henry IV. of
France, one of his contemporaries, said that he was "the wisest fool in
Christendom."

Now, it was this man who was making his royal progress from Edinburgh to
London in March, 1603, nearly a year before the gathering of men which we
were observing at the opening of this study. Many things happened on the
journey besides his falling off his horse several times; but one of the
most significant was the halting of the progress to receive what was
called the Miliary Petition, whose name implies that it was signed by a
thousand men--actually somewhat less than that number--mostly ministers of
the Church. The Petition made no mention of any Bible version, yet it was
the beginning of the events which led to it. Back of it was the Puritan
influence. It asked for reforms in the English Church, for the correction
of abuses which had grown under Elizabeth's increasing favor of ritual and
ceremony. It asked for a better-trained ministry, for better discipline in
the Church, for the omission of so many detailed requirements of rites and
ceremonies, and for that perennially desired reform, shorter church
services!

Very naturally the new King replied that he would take it up later, and
promised to call a conference to consider it. And this he did. The
conference met at Hampton Court in January, 1604, and it was for this that
the men were coming from many parts of England. The gathering was held on
the 14th, 16th, and 18th of the month. Its sole purpose was to consider
that Miliary Petition; but the King called to it not only those who had
signed the Petition, but those who had opposed it. He had no notion of
granting any favor to it, and from the first he gave the Puritans rough
treatment. He told them he would have none of their non-conformity, he
would "make them conform or harry them out of the land." Some one
suggested that since this was a Church matter there be called a Synod, or
some general gathering fitted to discuss and determine such things, rather
than leave it to a few Church dignitaries. For the purposes of the
petitioners it was a most unfortunate expression. James had just come from
Scotland, where the Presbyterians were with their Synod, and where
Calvinism was in full swing. He was much in favor of some elements of
Calvinism; but he could not see how all the elements held together.
Predestination, for example, which offends so many people to-day, was a
precious doctrine to King James, and he insisted that his subjects ought
to see how clearly God had predestined him to rule over them! But he
could not tolerate the necessary logical inference of Calvinism that all
men must be equal before God, and so men can make and unmake kings as they
need to do so, the matter of king or subject being purely an incidental
one. He remembered the time when Andrew Melville, one of the Scotch
ministers, had plucked him by his royal sleeve and called him "God's silly
vassal" right to his face. So, when some one said "Synod" it brought the
King up standing. He burst out: "If that is what you mean, if you want
what the Scotch mean by their Synod and their Presbytery, then I tell you
at once that I will have none of it. Presbytery agrees with monarchy very
much as God agrees with the devil. If you have no bishop, you will soon
have no king." He was perfectly right, with reference to the kind of king
he meant. These things were to be settled, he meant, by authority, and not
by conference. That is the point to which Gardiner refers when he says
that "in two minutes James sealed his own fate and that of England
forever."[16]

After that there was only a losing fight for the petitioners. They had
touched a sore spot in James's history. But it was when they touched that
sore spot again that they started the movement for a new version of the
Bible. It was on the second day of the conference, January 16th, that Dr.
Reynolds, president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who represented the
moderate Puritan position, and, like many moderate men, was rather
suspected by both extreme wings, instanced as one of the hardships of the
Puritans that they were compelled to use the prayer-book of the time, and
that it contained many mistranslations of Scripture, some of which he
quoted. Now, it so happens that the errors to which he referred occur in
the Bishops' and the Great Bible, which were the two authorized versions
of the time, but are all corrected in the Genevan version. We do not know
what point he was trying to make, whether he was urging that the Genevan
version should supplant these others, or whether he was calling for a new
translation. Indeed, we are not sure that he even mentioned the Genevan
version. But James spoke up to say that he had never yet seen a Bible well
translated into English; but the worst of all he thought the Genevan to
be. He spoke as though he had just had a copy given him by an English
lady, and had already noted what he called its errors. That was at the
very least a royal evasion, for if there was any Book he did know it was
the Genevan version. He had been fairly raised on it; he had lived in the
country where it was commonly used. It had been preached at him many and
many a time. Indeed, he had used it as the text for that paraphrase of the
Revelation of which we spoke a moment ago. And he knew its notes--well he
knew them--knew that they were from republican Geneva, and that kingly
pretensions had short shrift with them. James told the conference that
these notes were "very partial, untrue, seditious, savoring too much of
traitorous and dangerous conceits," supporting his opinion by two
instances which seemed disrespectful to royalty. One of these instances
was the note on Exodus i:17, where the Egyptian midwives are said to have
disobeyed the king in the matter of destroying the children. The note
says: "Their disobedience to the king was lawful, though their dissembling
was not." James quoted that, and said: "It is false; to disobey the king
is not lawful, and traitorous conceits should not go forth among the
people."

Some of the High Church party objected that there were translations enough
already; but it struck James's fancy to set them all aside by another
version, which he at once said he would order. It was to be made by the
most learned of both universities, then to be revised by the bishops and
other Church dignitaries, then presented to the Privy Council, and finally
to be passed upon by himself. There is the echo of some sharp Scotch
experiences in his declaration that there were to be no marginal notes in
that new version.

When they looked back on the conference, the Puritans felt that they had
lost everything, and the High Church people that they had gained
everything. One of the bishops, in a very servile way, and on his knee,
gave thanks to God for having given the country such a king, whose like
had never been seen since Christ was on earth. Certainly hard times were
ahead for the Puritans. The King harried them according to his word.
Within sixteen years some of them landed at Plymouth Rock, and things
began to happen on this side. That settlement at Plymouth was the outcome
of the threat the King had made at the Hampton Court conference.

But looking back one can see that the conference was worth while for the
beginning of the movement for the new version. The King was true to his
word in this line also, and before the year was out had appointed the
fifty-four best Bible scholars of the realm to make the new version. They
were to sit in six companies of nine each, two at Oxford, two at
Cambridge, and two at Westminster. The names of only forty-seven of them
have come down to us, and it is not known whether the other seven were
ever appointed, or in what way their names have been lost. It must be said
for the King that the only principle of selection was scholarship, and
when those six groups of men met they were men of the very first rank,
with no peers outside their own numbers--with one exception, and that
exception is of some passing interest. Hugh Broughton was probably the
foremost Hebrew scholar of England, perhaps of the world, at the time, and
apparently he was not appointed on the committee. Chiefly, it seems to
have been because he was a man of ungovernable temper and utterly unfitted
to work with others. Failure to appoint him, however, bit and rankled, and
the only keen and sharp criticism that was passed on the version in its
own day was by Hugh Broughton. He sent word to the King, after it was
completed, that as for himself he would rather be rent to pieces by wild
horses than have had any part in the urging of such a wretched version of
the Bible on the poor people. That was so manifestly pique, however, that
it is only to be regretted that the translation did not have the benefit
of his great Hebrew knowledge. John Selden, at his prime in that day,
voiced the feeling of most scholars of the times, that the new translation
was the best in the world and best gave the sense of the original.

We do not know much of the personnel of the company. Their names would
mean very little to us at this distance. All were clergymen except one.
There were bishops, college principals, university fellows, and rectors.
Dr. Reynolds, who suggested it in the first place, was a member, though he
did not live to see the work finished. This Dr. Reynolds, by the way, was
party to a most curious episode. He had been an ardent Roman Catholic, and
he had a brother who was an equally ardent Protestant. They argued with
each other so earnestly that each convinced the other; the Roman Catholic
became a Protestant, and the Protestant became a Roman Catholic! Dr.
Lancelot Andrewes, chairman of one of the two companies that met at
Westminster, was probably the most learned man in England. They said of
him that if he had been present at the tower of Babel he could have
interpreted for all the tongues present. The only trouble was that the
world lacked learning enough to know how learned he was. His company had
the first part of the Old Testament, and the simple dignity of the style
they used shows how scholarship and simplicity go easily together. Most
people would consider that the least satisfactory part of the work is the
second section, running from I Chronicles to Ecclesiastes. A convert from
another faith, who learned to read the Bible in English, once expressed to
a friend of my own his feeling that except for the Psalms and parts of
Job, there seemed to be here a distinct letting-down of the dignity of the
translation. There is good excuse for this, if it is so, for two leading
members of the company who had that section in charge, both eminent
Cambridge scholars, died very early in the work, and their places were not
filled. The third company, sitting at Oxford, were peculiarly strong, and
had for their portion the hardest part of the Old Testament--all the
prophetical writings. But they did their part with finest skill. The
fourth company, sitting at Cambridge, had the Apocrypha, the books which
lie between the Old and the New Testaments for the most part, or else are
supplemental to certain Old Testament books. Their work was rather hastily
and certainly poorly done, and has been dropped out of most editions. The
fifth company, sitting at Oxford, with great Greek scholars on it, took
the Gospels, the Acts, and the Revelation. This company had in it the one
layman, Sir Henry Savile, then the greatest Greek scholar in England. It
is the same Sir Henry Savile who heard, on his death-bed in 1621, that
James had with his own hands torn from the Journal of Parliament the pages
which bore the protest in favor of free speech in Parliament. Hearing it,
the faithful scholar prayed to die, saying: "I am ready to depart, the
rather that having lived in good times I foresee worse." The sixth company
met at Westminster and translated the New Testament epistles.

It was the original plan that when one company had finished its part, the
result should go to each of the other companies, coming back with their
suggestions to the original workers to be recast by them. The whole was
then to be reviewed by a smaller committee of scholars to give it
uniformity and to see it through the press. The records are not extant
that tell whether this was done in full detail, though we may presume that
each section of the Scripture had the benefit of the scholarship of the
entire company.

We know a good deal of the method of their work. We shall understand it
better by recalling what material they had at hand. They were enabled to
use the result of all the work that had been done before them. They were
instructed to follow the Bishops' Bible wherever they could do so fairly;
but they were given power to use the versions already named from Wiclif
down, as well as those fragmentary versions which were numerous, and of
which no mention has been made. They ransacked all English forms for
felicitous words and happy phrases. It is one of the interesting incidents
that this same Hugh Broughton, who was left off the committee and took it
so hard, yet without his will contributed some important matter to the
translation, because he had on his own authority made translations of
certain parts of the Scripture. Several of our capital phrases in the King
James version are from him. There was no effort to break out new paths.
Preference was always given to a familiar phrase rather than to a new one,
unless accuracy required it. First, then, they had the benefit of all the
work that had been done before in the same line, and gladly used it.

In addition, they had all other versions made in the tongues of the time.
Chiefly there was Luther's German Bible, already become for the German
tongue what their version was destined to be for the English tongue. There
were parts of the Bible available in Spanish, French, and Dutch. They were
kept at hand constantly for any light they might cast on difficult
passages.

For the Old Testament there were very few Hebrew texts. There had been
little critical work yet done on them, and for the most part there were
only different editions running back over the centuries. We have little
more than that now, and there is almost no new material on the Old
Testament since the days of the King James translators. There was, of
course, the Septuagint, the Greek translation from the Hebrew made before
Christ, with the guidance it could give in doubtful places on the probable
original. And finally there was the Vulgate, made into Latin out of the
Greek and Hebrew. This was all the Old Testament material they had, or
that any one could have in view of the antiquated original sources.

The New Testament material was more abundant, though not nearly so
abundant as to-day. There were few manuscripts of the early days to which
they could refer; but there were the two great critical versions of the
New Testament in Greek, that by Erasmus and the Complutensian, which had
made use of the best manuscripts known. Then, finally again, there was the
Vulgate.

We must stop a moment to see what was the value of the Vulgate in this
work. It is impossible to reckon the number of the early New Testament
manuscripts that have been lost. In the earlier day the Scriptures were
transmitted from church to church, and from age to age, by manuscripts.
Many of them were made as direct copies of other manuscripts; but many
were made by scribes to whom the manuscripts were read as they wrote, so
that there are many, though ordinarily comparatively slight, variations
among the manuscripts which we now know. More manuscripts are coming to
light constantly, manuscripts once well known and then lost. Many of them,
perhaps many earlier than we now have, must have been familiar to Jerome
four hundred years after Christ. When, therefore, there is a plain
difference between the Vulgate and our early Greek manuscripts, the
Vulgate may be wrong because it is only a translation; but it may be right
because it is a translation of earlier manuscripts than some of ours. It
is steadily losing its value at that point, for Greek manuscripts are all
the time coming to light which run farther back. But we must not minimize
the value of the Vulgate for our King James translation.

With all this material the scholars of the early seventeenth century set
to work. Each man in the group made the translation that seemed best to
him, and together they analyzed the results and finally agreed on the
best. They hunted the other versions to see if it had been better done
elsewhere. The shade of Tindale was over it all. The Genevan version was
most influential. The Douai had its share, and the Bishops' was the
general standard, altered only when accuracy required it. On all hard
passages they called to their aid the appropriate departments of both
universities. All scholars everywhere were asked to send in any
contributions, to correct or criticize as they would. Public announcement
of the work was made, and all possible help was besought and gladly
accepted.

Very faithfully these greatest scholars of their time wrought. No one
worked for money, and no one worked for pay, but each for the joy of the
working. Three years they spent on the original work, three years on
careful revision and on the marginal references by which Scripture was
made to throw light on Scripture. Then in six months a committee reviewed
it all, put it through the press, and at last, in 1611, with the imprint
of Robert Barker, Printer to the King's Most Excellent Majesty, the King
James version appeared. The name Authorized Version is not a happy one,
for so far as the records go it was never authorized either by the King or
the bishop; and, even if it were, the authority does not extend beyond the
English Church, which is a very small fraction of those who use it. On the
title-page of the original version, as on so many since, is the familiar
line, "Appointed to be Read in Churches," but who made the appointment
history does not say.

The version did not at once supersede the Genevan and the Bishops'; but it
was so incomparably better than either that gradually they disappeared,
and by sheer excellence it took the field, and it holds the field to-day
in spite of the numerous supposedly improved versions that have appeared
under private auspices. It holds the field, also, in spite of the
excellent revised version of 1881 made by authority, and the more
excellent version issued in 1901 by the American Revision Committee,
to-day undoubtedly the best version in existence, considered simply as a
reproduction of the sense of the original. And for reasons that may later
appear, the King James version bids fair to hold the field for many years
to come.

When we turn from the history of its making to the work itself, there is
much to say. We may well narrow our thought for the remainder of the study
to its traits as a _version_ of the Bible.

I. Name this first, that it is an honest version. That is, it has no
argumentative purpose. It is not, as the scholars say, apologetic. It is
simply an out-and-out version of the Scripture, as honestly as they could
reproduce it. There were Puritans on the committee; there were extreme
High Churchmen; there were men of all grades between. But there is nowhere
any evidence that any one was set on making the Bible prove his point.
There were strong anti-papal believers among them; but they made free use
of the Douai version, and, of course, of the Vulgate. They knew the
feeling that Hugh Broughton had toward them; but they made generous use of
all that was good in his work. They were working under a royal warrant,
and their dedication to King James, with its absurd and fulsome flattery,
shows what they were capable of when they thought of the King. But there
is no twist of a text to make it serve the purposes of royalty. They might
be servile when they thought of King James; but there was not a touch of
servility in them when they thought of the Scripture itself. They were
under instruction not to abandon the use of ecclesiastical terms. For
instance, they were not to put "congregation" in place of "church," as
some Puritans wanted to do. Some thought that was meant to insure a High
Church version; but the translators did not understand it so for a moment.
They understood it only to safeguard them against making a partisan
version on either side, and to help them to make a version which the
people could read understandingly at once. It was not to be a Puritan Book
nor a High Church Book. It was to be an honest version of the Bible, no
matter whose side it sustained.

Now, if any one thinks that is easy, or only a matter of course, he
plainly shows that he has never been a theologian or a scholar in a
contested field. Ask any lawyer whether it is easy to handle his
authorities with entire impartiality, whether it is a matter of course
that he will let them say just what they meant to say when his case is
involved. Of course, he will seek to do it as an honest lawyer, but
equally, of course, he will have to keep close watch on himself or he will
fail in doing it. Ask any historian whether it is easy to handle the
original documents in a field in which he has firm and announced
opinions, and to let those documents speak exactly what they mean to say,
whether they support him or not. The greater historians will always do it,
but they will sometimes do it with a bit of a wrench.

Even a scholar is human, and these men sitting in their six companies
would all have to meet this Book afterward, would have their opinions
tried by it. There must have been times when some of them would be
inclined to salt the mine a little, to see that it would yield what they
would want it to yield later. So far as these men were able to do it, they
made it say in English just what it said in Hebrew and Greek. They showed
no inclination to use it as a weapon in their personal warfare.

One line of that honest effort is worth observing more closely. When
points were open to fair discussion, and scholarship had not settled them,
they were careful not to let their version take sides when it could be
avoided. On some mooted words they did not try translation, but
transliteration instead. That is, they brought the Greek or Hebrew word
over into English, letter by letter. Suppose scholars differed as to the
exact meaning in English of a word in the Greek. Some said it has this
meaning, and some that it has that. Now, if the version committed itself
to one of those meanings, it became an argument at once against the other
and helped to settle a question on which scholarship was not yet agreed.
They could avoid making a partisan Book by the simple device of bringing
the word which was disputed over into the new translation. That left the
discussion just where it was before, but it saved the work from being
partisan. The method of transliteration did not always work to advantage,
as we shall see, but it was intended throughout to save the Book from
taking sides on any question where honest men might differ as to the
meaning of words.

They did that with all proper names, and that was notable in the Old
Testament, because most Old Testament proper names can be translated. They
all mean something in themselves. Adam is the Hebrew word for man; Abraham
means Father of a Great Multitude; David is the Hebrew word for Beloved;
Malachi means My Messenger. Yet as proper names they do not mean any of
those things. It is impossible to translate a proper name into another
tongue without absurdity. It must be transliterated. Yet there is constant
fascination for translators in the work of translating these proper names,
trying to make them seem more vivid. It is quite likely, though it is
disputed, that proper names do all go back to simple meanings. But by the
time they become proper names they no longer have those meanings. The only
proper treatment of them is by transliteration.

The King James translators follow that same practice of transliteration
rather than translation with another word which is full of controversial
possibility. I mean the word "baptism." There was dispute then as now
about the method of that ordinance in early Christian history. There were
many who held that the classical meaning which involved immersion had been
taken over bodily into the Christian faith, and that all baptism was by
immersion. There were others who held that while that might be the
classical meaning of the word, yet in early Christian custom baptism was
not by immersion, but might be by sprinkling or pouring, and who insisted
that no pressure on the mode was wise or necessary. That dispute continues
to this day. Early versions of the Bible already figured in the
discussion, and for a while there was question whether this King James
version should take sides in that controversy, about which men equally
loyal to truth and early Christian history could honestly differ. The
translators avoided taking sides by bringing the Greek word which was
under discussion over into English, letter by letter. Our word "baptism"
is not an English word nor a Saxon word; it is a purely Greek word. The
controversy has been brought over into the English language; but the King
James version avoided becoming a controversial book. A number of years ago
the convictions of some were so strong that another version of the Bible
was made, in which the word baptism was carefully replaced by what was
believed to be the English translation, "immersion," but the version never
had wide influence.

In this connection it is well to notice the effort of the King James
translators at a fair statement of the divine name. It will be remembered
that it appears in the Old Testament ordinarily as "LORD," printed in
small capitals. A very interesting bit of verbal history lies back of that
word. The word which represents the divine name in Hebrew consists of four
consonants, J or Y, H, V, and H. There are no vowels; indeed, there were
no vowels in the early Hebrew at all. Those that we now have were added
not far from the time of Christ. No one knows the original pronunciation
of that sacred name consisting of four letters. At a very early day it had
become too sacred to pronounce, so that when men came to it in reading or
in speech, they simply used another word which is, translated into
English, Lord, a word of high dignity. When the time came that vowels were
to be added to the consonants, the vowels of this other word Lord were
placed under the consonants of the sacred name, so that in the word
Jehovah, where the J H V H occur, there are the consonants of one word
whose vowels are unknown and the vowels of another word whose consonants
are not used.

Illustrate it by imagining that in American literature the name Lincoln
gathered to itself such sacredness that it was never pronounced and only
its consonants were ever printed. Suppose that whenever readers came to it
they simply said Washington, thinking Lincoln all the while. Then think of
the displacement of the vowels of Lincoln by the vowels of Washington. You
have a word that looks like Lancilon or Lanicoln; but a reader would never
pronounce so strange a word. He would always say Washington, yet he would
always think the other meaning. And while he would retain the meaning in
some degree, he would soon forget the original word, retaining only his
awe of it. Which is just what happened with the divine name. The Hebrews
knew it was not Lord, yet they always said Lord when they came to the
four letters that stood for the sacred word. The word Jehovah, made up of
the consonants of an unknown word and the vowels of a familiar word, is in
itself meaningless. Scholarship is not yet sure what was the original
meaning of the sacred name with its four consonants.

These translators had to face that problem. It was a peculiar problem at
that time. How should they put into English the august name of God when
they did not know what the true vowels were? There was dispute among
scholars. They did not take sides as our later American Revision has done,
some of us think quite unwisely. They chose to retain the Hebrew usage,
and print the divine name in unmistakable type so that its personal
meaning could not be mistaken.

On the other hand, disputes since their day have shown how they translated
when transliteration would have been wiser. Illustrate with one instance.
There is a Hebrew word, Sheol, with a Greek word, Hades, which corresponds
to it. Usage had adopted the Anglo-Saxon word Hell as the equivalent of
both of these words, so they translated Sheol and Hades with the English
word Hell. The only question that had been raised was by that Hugh
Broughton of whom we were speaking a moment ago, and it had not seemed a
serious one. Certainly the three terms have much in common, and there are
places where both the original words seemed to be virtually equivalent to
the Anglo-Saxon Hell, but they are not the same. The Revised Version of
our own time returned to the original, and instead of translating those
words whose meaning can be debated, it transliterated them and brought the
Hebrew word Sheol and the Greek word Hades over into English. That, of
course, gave a chance for paragraphers to say that the Revised Version had
read Hell out of the Scriptures. All that happened was that cognizance was
taken of a dispute which would have guided the King James translators if
it had existed in their time, and we should not have become familiar with
the Anglo-Saxon word Hell as the translation of those disputed Hebrew and
Greek words.

We need not seek more instances. These are enough to illustrate the saying
that here is an honest version, the fruit of the best scholarship of the
times, without prejudice.

II. A second trait of the work as a version is its remarkable accuracy. It
is surprising that with all the new light coming from early documents,
with all the new discoveries that have been made, the latest revision
needed to make so few changes, and those for the most part minor ones.
There are, to be sure, some important changes, as we shall see later; the
wonder is that there are not many more. The King James version had, to be
sure, the benefit of all the earlier controversy. The whole ground had
been really fought over in the centuries before, and most of the questions
had been discussed. They frankly made use of all the earlier controversy.
They say in their preface: "Truly, good Christian reader, we never thought
from the beginning that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet
to make a bad one a good one, but to make a good one better. That hath
been our endeavor, that our work." Also, they had the advantage of
deliberation. This was the first version that had been made which had such
sanction that they could take their time, and in which they had no reason
to fear that the results would endanger them. They say in their preface
that they had not run over their work with that "posting haste" that had
marked the Septuagint, if the saying was true that they did it all in
seventy-two days; nor were they "barred and hindered from going over it
again," as Jerome himself said he had been, since as soon as he wrote any
part "it was snatched away from him and published"; nor were they
"working in a new field," as Origen was when he wrote his first
commentary on the Bible. Both these things--their taking advantage of
earlier controversies which had cleared many differences, and their
deliberation--were supplemented by a third which gave great accuracy to
the version. That was their adoption of the principle of all early
translators, perhaps worded best by Purvey, who completed the Wiclif
version: "The best translation is to translate after the sentence, and not
only after the words, so that the sentence be as open in English as in
Latin." That makes for accuracy. It is quite impossible to put any
language over, word for word, into another without great inaccuracy. But
when the translators sought to take the sentence of the Hebrew or the
Greek and put it into an exactly equivalent English sentence, they had
larger play for their language and they had a fairer field for accuracy.
These were the three great facts which made the remarkable accuracy
possible, and it may be interesting to note three corresponding results
which show the effort they made to be absolutely accurate and fair in
their translation.

The first of those results is visible in the italicized words which they
used. In the King James version words in italics are a frank
acknowledgment that the Greek or the Hebrew cannot be put into English
literally. These are English words which are put in because it seems
impossible to express the meaning originally intended without certain
additions which the reader must take into account in his understanding of
the version. We need not think far to see how necessary that was. The
arrangement of words in Greek, for example, is different from that in
English. The Greek of the first verse of the Gospel of John reads that
"God was the Word," but the English makes its sentences in a reversed
form, and it really means, "the Word was God." So the Greek uses particles
where the English does not. Often it would say "the God" where we would
say simply "God." Those particles are ordinarily wisely omitted. So the
Greek does not use verbs at some points where it is quite essential that
the English shall use them. But it is only fair that in reading a version
of the Scripture we should know what words have been put in by translators
in their effort to make the version clear to us; and the italicized words
of the King James version are a frank effort to be accurate and yet fair.

The second result which shows their effort at accuracy is in the marginal
readings. Most of these are optional readings, and are preceded by the
word "or," which indicates that one may read what is in the text, or
substitute for it what is in the margin with equal fairness to the
original. But sometimes, instead of that familiar "or," occur letters
which indicate that the Hebrew or the Greek literally means something else
than what is given in the English text, and what it literally means is
given in the margin. The translators thereby say to the reader that if he
can take that literal meaning and put it into the text so that it is
intelligible to him, here is his chance. As for them, they think that the
whole context or meaning of the sentence rather involves the use of the
phrase which they put into the text. But the marginal references are of
great interest to most of us as showing how these men were frank to say
that there were some things they could not settle. They were rather blamed
for it, chiefly by those who had committed themselves to the Douai
version, which has no marginal readings, on the ground that the
translation ought to be as authoritative as the original. The King James
translators repudiate that theory and frankly say that the reason they put
these words in the margin was because they were not sure what was the best
reading. In the margin of the epistle to the Romans there are eighty-four
such marginal readings, and the proportion will hold throughout most of
the version. They were only trying to be accurate and to give every one a
chance to make up his own mind where there was fair reason to question
their results.

The third thing which shows their effort at accuracy is their explicit
avoidance of uniformity in translating the same word. They tried to put
the meaning into English terms. So, as they say, the one word might become
either "journeying" or "traveling"; one word might be "thinking" or
"supposing," "joy" or "gladness," "eternal" or "everlasting." One of the
reasons they give for this is quaint enough to quote. They said they did
not think it right to honor some words by giving them a place forever in
the Bible, while they virtually said to other equally good words: Get ye
hence and be banished forever. They quote a "certaine great philosopher"
who said that those logs were happy which became images and were
worshiped, while other logs as good as they were laid behind the fire to
be burned. So they sought to use as many English words, familiar in speech
and commonly understood, as they might, lest they should impoverish the
language, and so lose out of use good words. There is no doubt that in
this effort both to save the language, and to represent accurately the
meaning of the original, they sometimes overdid that avoidance of
uniformity. There were times when it would have been well if the words had
been more consistently translated. For example, in the epistle of James
ii:2, 3, you have goodly "apparel," vile "raiment," and gay "clothing,"
all translating one Greek word. Our revised versions have sought to
correct such inconsistencies. But it was all done in the interest of an
accuracy that should yet not be a slavish uniformity.

This will be enough to illustrate what was meant in speaking of the effort
of the translators to achieve accuracy in their version.

III. The third marked trait of the work as a version of the Scripture is
its striking blending of dignity and popularity in its language. At any
period of a living language, there are three levels of speech. There is an
upper level used by the clearest thinkers and most careful writers, always
correct according to the laws of the language, generally somewhat remote
from common life--the habitual speech of the more intellectual. There is
also the lower level used by the least intellectual, frequently incorrect
according to the laws of the language, rough, containing what we now call
"slang," the talk of a knot of men on the street corner waiting for a new
bulletin of a ball game, cheap in words, impoverished in synonyms, using
one word to express any number of ideas, as slang always does. Those two
levels are really farther apart than we are apt to realize. A book or an
article on the upper level will be uninteresting and unintelligible to the
people on the lower level. And a book in the language of the lower level
is offensive and disgusting to those of the upper level. That is not
because the ideas are so remote, but because the characteristic
expressions are almost unfamiliar to the people of the different levels.
The more thoughtful people read the abler journals of the day; they read
the editorials or the more extended articles; they read also the great
literature. If they take up the sporting page of a newspaper to read the
account of a ball game written in the style of the lower level of thought,
where words are misused in disregard of the laws of the language, and
where one word is made to do duty for a great many ideas, they do it
solely for amusement. They could never think of finding their mental
stimulus in that sort of thing. On the other hand, there are people who
find in that kind of reading their real interest. If they should take up a
thoughtful editorial or a book of essays, they would not know what the
words mean in the connection in which they are used. They speak a good
deal about the vividness of this lower-level language, about its
popularity; they speak with a sneer about the stiffness and dignity of
that upper level.

These are, however, only the two extremes, for there is always a middle
level where move words common to both, where are avoided the words
peculiar to each. It is the language that most people speak. It is the
language of the street, and also of the study, of the parlor, and of the
shop. But it has little that is peculiar to either of those other levels,
or to any one place where a man may live his life and do his talking. If
we illustrate from other literature, we can say that Macaulay's essays
move on the upper level, and that much of the so-called popular literature
of our day moves on the lower level, while Dickens moves on the middle
level, which means that men whose habitual language is that of the upper
and the lower levels can both enter into the spirit of his writing.

Now, originally the Bible moved on that middle level. It was a colloquial
book. The languages in which it first appeared were not in the classic
forms. They are the languages of the streets where they were written. The
Hebrew is almost our only example of the tongue at its period, but it is
not a literary language in any case. The Greek of the New Testament is not
the Eolic, the language of the lyrics of Sappho; nor the Doric, the
language of war-songs or the chorus in the drama; nor the Ionic, the
dialect of epic poetry; but the Attic Greek, and a corrupted form of that,
a form corrupted by use in the streets and in the markets.

That was the original language of the Bible, a colloquial language. But
that fact does not determine the translation. Whether it shall be put into
the English language on the upper level or on the lower level is not so
readily determined. Efforts have been made to put it into the language of
each level. We have a so-called elegant translation, and we have the Bible
cast into the speech of the common day. The King James version is on the
middle level. It is a striking blending of the dignity of the upper level
and the popularity of the lower level.

There is tremendous significance in the fact that these men were making a
version which should be for all people, making it out in the open day with
the king and all the people behind them. It was the first independent
version which had been made under such favorable circumstances. Most of
the versions had been made in private by men who were imperiling
themselves in their work. They did not expect the Book to pass into common
use; they knew that the men who received the result of their work would
have to be those who were earnest enough to go into secret places for
their reading. But here was a changed condition. These men were making a
version by royal authority, a version awaited with eager interest by the
people in general. The result is that it is a people's Book. Its phrases
are those of common life, those that had lived up to that time. It is not
in the peculiar language of the times. If you want to know the language of
their own times, read these translators' servile, unhistorical dedication
to the king, or their far nobler preface to the reader. That is the
language peculiar to their own day. But the language of the Bible itself
is that form which had lived its way into common use. One hundred years
after Wiclif it yet speaks his language in large part, for that part had
really lived. In the _Bibliotheca Pastorum_ Ruskin makes comment on Sir
Philip Sidney and his metrical version of the Psalms in these words: "Sir
Philip Sidney will use any cow-boy or tinker words if they only help him
to say precisely in English what David said in Hebrew; impressed the
while himself so vividly of the majesty of the thought itself that no
tinker's language can lower it or vulgarize it in his mind." The King
James translators were most eager to say what the original said, and to
say it so that the common man could well understand it, and yet so that it
should not be vulgarized or cheapened by adoption of cheap words.

In his History Hallam passes some rather sharp strictures on the English
of the King James version, remarking that it abounds in uncouth phrases
and in words whose meaning is not familiar, and that whatever is to be
said it is, at any rate, not in the English of the time of King James. And
that latter saying is true, though it must be remembered that Hallam wrote
in the period when no English was recognized by literary people except
that of the upper level, when they did not know that these so-called
uncouth phrases were to return to common use. To-day it would be absurd to
say that the Bible is full of uncouth phrases. Professor Cook has said
that "the movement of English diction, which in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries was on the whole away from the Bible, now returns
with ever-accelerating speed toward it." If the phrases went out, they
came back. But it is true that the English of the King James version is
not that of the time of James I., only because it is the English of the
history of the language. It has not immortalized for us the tongue of its
times, because it has taken that tongue from its beginning and determined
its form. It carefully avoided words that were counted coarse. On the
other hand, it did not commit itself to words which were simply
refinements of verbal construction. That, I say, is a general fact.

It can be illustrated in one or two ways. For instance, a word which has
become common to us is the neuter possessive pronoun "its." That word does
not occur in the edition of 1611, and appears first in an edition in the
printing of 1660. In place of it, in the edition of 1611, the more
dignified personal pronoun "his" or "her" is always used, and it continues
for the most part in our familiar version. In this verse you notice it:
"Look not upon the wine when it is red; when it giveth _his_ color aright
in the cup." In the Levitical law especially, where reference is made to
sacrifices, to the articles of the furniture of the tabernacle, or other
neuter objects, the masculine pronoun is almost invariably used. In the
original it was invariably used. You see the other form in the familiar
verse about charity, that it "doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh
not _her_ own, is not easily provoked." Now, there is evidence that the
neuter possessive pronoun was just coming into use. Shakespeare uses it
ten times in his works, but ten times only, and a number of writers do not
use it at all. It was, to be sure, a word beginning to be heard on the
street, and for the most part on the lower level. The King James
translators never used it. The dignified word was that masculine or
feminine pronoun, and they always use it in place of the neuter.

On the other hand, there was a word which was coming into use on the upper
level which has become common property to us now. It is the word
"anxiety." It is not certain just when it came into use. I believe
Shakespeare does not use it; and it occurs very little in the literature
of the times. Probably it was known to these translators. When they came,
however, to translating a word which now we translate by "anxious" or
"anxiety" they did not use that word. It was not familiar. They used
instead the word which represented the idea for the people of the middle
level; they used the word "thought." So they said, "Take no thought for
the morrow," where we would say, "Be not anxious for the morrow." There is
a contemporary document which illustrates how that word "thought" was
commonly used, in which we read: "In five hundred years only two queens
died in child birth, Queen Catherine Parr having died rather of thought."
That was written about the time of the King James version, and "thought"
evidently means worry or anxiety. Neither of those words, the neuter
possessive pronoun or the new word "anxious," got into the King James
version. One was coming into proper use from the lower level, and one was
coming into proper use from the upper level. They had not yet so arrived
that they could be used.

One result of this care to preserve dignity and also popularity appears in
the fact that so few words of the English version have become obsolete.
Words disappear upward out of the upper level or downward out of the lower
level, but it takes a long time for a word to get out of a language once
it is in confirmed use on the middle level. Of course, the version itself
has tended to keep words familiar; but no book, no matter how widely used,
can prevent some words from passing off the stage or from changing their
meaning so noticeably that they are virtually different words. Yet even in
those words which do not become common there is very little tendency to
obsolescence in the King James version. More words of Shakespeare have
become obsolete or have changed their meanings than in the King James
version.

There is one interesting illustration to which attention has been called
by Dr. Davidson, which is interesting. In the ninth chapter of the Judges,
where we are told about Abimelech, the fifty-third verse reads that a
woman cast a stone down from the wall and "all to break his skull." That
is confessedly rather obscure. Our ordinary understanding of it would be
that she did that for no other purpose than just to break the skull of
Abimelech. As a matter of fact, that expression is a printer's bungling
way of giving a word which has become obsolete in the original form. When
the King James translators wrote that, they used the word "alto," which is
evidently the beginning of "altogether," or wholly or utterly, and what
they meant was that she threw the stone and utterly broke his skull. But
that abbreviated form of the word passed out of use, and when later
printers--not much later--came to it they did not know what it meant and
divided it as it stands in our present text. It is one of the few words
that have become obsolete. But so few are there of them, that it was made
a rule of the Revised Version not to admit to the new version, where it
could be avoided, any word not already found in the Authorized Version,
and also not to omit from the Revised Version, except under pressure of
necessity, any word which occurred there. It is largely this blending of
dignity and popularity that has made the King James version so influential
in English literature. It talks the language not of the upper level nor of
the lower level, but of that middle level where all meet sometimes and
where most men are all the while.

These are great traits to mark a book, any book, but especially a
translation--that it is honest, that it is accurate, and that its language
blends dignity and popularity so that it lowers the speech of none. They
are all conspicuous traits of our familiar version of the Bible, and in
them in part lies its power with the generations of these three centuries
that have followed its appearance.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] Trevelyan, _England Under the Stuarts_.

[13] _History of England_, chap. i.

[14] _Short History of the English People_, chap. viii, sec. ii.

[15] Trevelyan, _England Under the Stuarts_, p. 107.

[16] _History of England, 1603-42._




LECTURE III

THE KING JAMES VERSION AS ENGLISH LITERATURE


Let it be plainly said at the very first that when we speak of the
literary phases of the Bible we are not discussing the book in its
historic meaning. It was never meant as literature in our usual sense of
the word. Nothing could have been further from the thought of the men who
wrote it, whoever they were and whenever they wrote, than that they were
making a world literature. They had the characteristics of men who do make
great literature--they had clear vision and a great passion for truth;
they loved their fellows mightily, and they were far more concerned to be
understood than to speak. These are traits that go to make great writers.
But it was never in their minds that they were making a world literature.
The Bible is a book of religious significance from first to last. If it
utterly broke down by the tests of literature, it might be as great a
book as it needs to be. It is a subordinate fact that by the tests of
literature it proves also to be great. Prof. Gardiner, of Harvard, whose
book called _The Bible as English Literature_ makes other such works
almost unnecessary, frankly bases his judgment on the result of critical
study of the Bible, but he serves fair warning that he takes inspiration
for granted, and thinks it "obvious that no literary criticism of the
Bible could hope for success which was not reverent in tone. A critic who
should approach it superciliously or arrogantly would miss all that has
given the Book its power as literature and its lasting and universal
appeal."[17] Farther over in his book he goes on to say that when we
search for the causes of the feelings which made the marvelous style of
the Bible a necessity, explanation can make but a short step, for "we are
in a realm where the only ultimate explanation is the fact of inspiration;
and that is only another way of saying that we are in the presence of
forces above and beyond our present human understanding."[18]

However, we may fairly make distinction between the Bible as an original
work and the Bible as a work of English literature. For the Bible as an
original work is not so much a book as a series of books, the work of
many men working separately over a period of at least fifteen hundred
years, and these men unconscious for the most part of any purpose of
agreement. This series of books is made one book in the original by the
unity of its general purpose and the agreement of its parts. The Bible in
English is, however, not a series of books, but properly one book, the
work of six small groups of men working in conscious unity through a short
period of years. And while there is variation in style, while there are
inequalities in result, yet it stands as a single piece of English
literature. It has a literary style of its own, even though it feels
powerfully the Hebrew influence throughout. And while it would not be a
condemnation of the Bible if it were not great literature in English or
elsewhere, it is still part of its power that by literary standards alone
it measures large.

It is so that men of letters have rated it since it came into existence.
"It holds a place of pre-eminence in the republic of letters." When John
Richard Green comes to deal with it, he says: "As a mere literary monument
the English version of the Bible remains the noblest language of the
English tongue, while its perpetual use made of it from the instant of its
appearance the standard of our language."[19] And in Macaulay's essay on
Dryden, while he is deploring the deterioration of English style, he yet
says that in the period when the English language was imperiled there
appeared "the English Bible, a book which if everything else in our
language should perish would alone suffice to show the extent of its
beauty and power."

The mere fact that the English Bible contains a religion does not affect
its standing as literature. Homer and Virgil are Greek and Roman classics,
yet each of them contains a definite religion. You can build up the
religious faith of the Greeks and Romans out of their great literature. So
you can build up the religious faith of the Hebrews and the early
Christians from the Old and New Testaments. "For fifteen centuries a
Hebrew Book, the Bible, contained almost the whole literature and learning
of a whole nation," while it was also the book of their religion.

As literature, however, apart from its religious connection, it is subject
to any of the criteria of literature. In so far it is the fair subject of
criticism. It must stand or fall when it enters the realm of literature by
the standards of other books. Indeed, many questions regarding its dates,
the authorship of unassigned portions, the meaning of its disputed
passages may be answered most fairly by literary tests. That is always
liable to abuse; but literary tests are always liable to that. There have
been enough blunders made in the knowledge of us all to require us to go
carefully in such a matter. The Waverley Novels were published
anonymously, and, while some suspected Scott at once, others were entirely
clear that on the ground of literary style his authorship was entirely
impossible! Let a magazine publish an anonymous serial, and readers
everywhere are quick to recognize the writer from his literary style and
his general ideas, but each group "recognizes" a different writer.
Arguments based chiefly on style overlook the large personal equation in
all writing. The same writer has more than one natural style. It is not
until he becomes in a certain sense affected--grows proud of his
peculiarities--that he settles down to one form. And it is quite
impossible to assign a book to any narrow historical period on the ground
of its style alone. But though large emphasis could be laid upon the
literary merits of the Bible to the obscuring of its other more important
merits, it is yet true that from the literary point of view the Bible
stands as an English classic, indeed, as the outstanding English classic.
To acknowledge ignorance of it is to confess one's self ignorant of our
greatest literary possession.

A moment ago it was said that as a piece of literature the Bible must
accept the standards of other literary books. For all present purposes we
can define great literature as worthy written expression of great ideas.
If we may take the word "written" for granted, the rough definition
becomes this: that great literature is the worthy expression of great
ideas. Works which claim to be great in literature may fail of greatness
in either half of that test. Petty, local, unimportant ideas may be well
clothed, or great ideas may be unworthily expressed; in either case the
literature is poor. It is not until great ideas are wedded to worthy
expression that literature becomes great. Failure at one end or the other
will explain the failure of most of the work that seeks to be accounted
literature. The literary value of a book cannot be determined by its style
alone. It is possible to say nothing gracefully, even with dignity,
symmetry, rhythm; but it is not possible to make literature without ideas.
Abiding literature demands large ideas worthily expressed. Now, of course,
"large" and "small" are not words that are usually applied to the
measurement of ideas; but we can make them seem appropriate here. Let us
mean that an idea is large or small according to its breadth of interest
to the race and its length of interest to the race. If there is an idea
which is of value to all the members of the human race to-day, and which
does not lose its value as the generations come and go, that is the
largest possible idea within human thought. Transient literature may do
without those large ideas. A gifted young reporter may describe a dog
fight or a presidential nominating convention in such terms as lift his
article out of carelessness and hasty newspaper writing into the realm of
real literature; but it cannot become abiding literature. It has not a
large enough idea to keep it alive. And to any one who loves worthy
expression there is a sense of degradation in the use of fine literary
powers for the description of purely transient local events. It is always
regrettable when men with literary skill are available for the description
of a ball game, or are exploited as worthy writers about a prize-fight. If
a man has power to express ideas well, he ought to use that power for the
expression of great ideas.

Many of us have seen a dozen books hailed as classic novels sure to live,
each of them the great American novel at last, the author to be compared
with Dickens and Thackeray and George Eliot. And the books have gone the
way of all the earth. With some, the trouble is a weak, involved, or
otherwise poor style. With most the trouble is lack of real ideas. Charles
Dickens, to be sure, does deal with boarding-schools in England, with
conditions which in their local form do not recur and are not familiar to
us; but he deals with them as involving a great principle of the relation
of society to youth, and so _David Copperfield_ or _Oliver Twist_ becomes
a book for the life of all of us, and for all time. And even here it is
evident that not all of Dickens's work will live, but only that which is
least narrowly local and is most broadly human.

There is a further striking illustration in a familiar event in American
history. Most young people are required to study Webster's speech in reply
to Robert Hayne in the United States Senate, using it as a model in
literary construction. The speech of Hayne is lost to our interest, yet
the fact is that Hayne himself was gifted in expression, that by the
standards of simple style his speech compares favorably with that of
Webster. Yet reading Webster's reply takes one not to the local condition
which was concerning Hayne, but to a great principle of liberty and
union. He shows that principle emerging in history; the local touches are
lost to thought as he goes on, and a truth is expressed in terms of
history which will be valid until history is ended. It is not simply
Webster's style; it is that with his great idea which made his reply
memorable.

That neither ideas nor style alone can keep literature alive is shown by
literary history after Shakespeare. Just after him you have the
"mellifluous poets" of the next period on the one hand, with style enough,
but with such attenuated ideas that their work has died. Who knows Drayton
or Brown or Wither? On the other hand, there came the metaphysicians with
ideas in abundance, but not style, and their works have died.

Here, then, is the English Bible becoming the chief English classic by the
wedding of great ideas to worthy expression. From one point of view this
early seventeenth century was an opportune time for making such a classic.
Theology was a popular subject. Men's minds had found a new freedom, and
they used it to discuss great themes. They even began to sing. The reign
of Elizabeth had prepared the way. The English scholar Hoare traces this
new liberty to the sailing away of the Armada and the releasing of
England from the perpetual dread of Spanish invasion. He says that the
birds felt the free air, and sang as they had never sung before and as
they have not often sung since. But this was not restricted to the birds
of English _song_. It was a period of remarkable awakening in the whole
intellectual life of England, and that intellectual life was directing
itself among the common people to religion. Another English writer, Eaton,
says a profounder word in tracing the awakening to the reformation, saying
that it "could not fail, from the very nature of it, to tinge the
literature of the Elizabethan era. It gave a logical and disputatious
character to the age and produced men mighty in the Scriptures."[20] A
French visitor went home disgusted because people talked of nothing but
theology in England. Grotius thought all the people of England were
theologians. James's chief pride was his theological learning. It did not
prove difficult to find half a hundred men in small England instantly
recognized as experts in Scripture study. The people were ready to welcome
a book of great ideas. Let us pass by those ideas a moment, remembering
that they are not enough in themselves to give the work literary value,
and turn our minds to the style of the English Bible.

From this point of view the times were not perfectly opportune for a piece
of pure English literature, though it was the time which produced
Shakespeare. A definite movement was on to refine the language by foreign
decorations. Not even Shakespeare avoids it always. No writer of the time
avoids it wholly. The dedication of the King James version shows that
these scholars themselves did not avoid it. In that dedication, and their
preface, they give us fine writing, striving for effect, ornamental
phrases characteristic of the time. Men were feeling that this English
language was rough and barbarous, insufficient, needing enlargement by the
addition of other words constructed in a foreign form. The essays of Lord
Bacon are virtually contemporaneous with this translation. Macaulay says a
rather hard word in calling his style "odious and deformed,"[21] but when
one turns from Bacon to the English Bible there is a sharp contrast in
mere style, and it favors the Bible. The contrast is as great as that
which Carlyle first felt between the ideas of Shakespeare and those of the
Bible when he said that "this world is a catholic kind of place; the
Puritan gospel and Shakespeare's plays: such a pair of facts I have rarely
seen save out of one chimerical generation."[22] And that gives point to
the word already quoted from Hallam that the English of the King James
version is not the English of James I.

Four things helped to determine the simplicity and pure
English--unornamented English--of the King James version, made it, that
is, the English classic. Two of these things have been dealt with already
in other connections. First, that it was a Book for the people, for the
people of the middle level of language; a work by scholars, but not
chiefly for scholars, intended rather for the common use of common people.
Secondly, that the translators were constantly beholden to the work of the
past in this same line. Where Wiclif's words were still in use they used
them. That tended to fix the language by the use which had already become
natural.

The other two determining influences must be spoken of now. The third lies
in the fact that the English language was still plastic. It had not fallen
into such hard forms that its words were narrow or restricted. The truth
is that from the point of view of pure literature the Bible is better in
English than it is in Greek or Hebrew. That is, the English of the King
James version as English is better than the Greek of the New Testament as
Greek. As for the Hebrew there was little development for many
generations; Renan thinks there was none at all. The difference comes from
the point of time in the growth of the tongue when the Book was written.
The Greek was written when the language was old, when it had
differentiated its terms, when it had become corrupted by outside
influence. The English version was written when the language was new and
fresh, when a word could be taken and set in its meaning without being
warped from some earlier usage. The study of the Greek Testament is always
being complicated by the effort to bring into its words the classical
meaning, when so far as the writers of the New Testament were concerned
they had no interest in the classical meaning, but only in the current
meaning of those words. In the English language there was as yet no
classical meaning; it was exactly that meaning that these writers were
giving the words when they brought them into their version.[23] There is
large advantage in the fact that the age was not a scientific one, that
the language had not become complicated. So it becomes interesting to
observe with Professor March that ninety-three per cent. of these words,
counting also repetitions, are native English words. The language was new,
was still plastic. It had not been stiffened by use. It received its set
more definitely from the English Bible than from any other one work--more
than from Shakespeare, whose influence was second.

The fourth fact which helped to determine its English style is the loyalty
of the translators to the original, notably the Hebrew. It is a common
remark of the students of the original tongues that the Hebrew and Greek
languages are peculiarly translatable. That is notable in the Hebrew. It
is not a language of abstract terms. The tendency of language is always to
become vague, since we are lazy in the use of it. We use one word in
various ways, and a pet one for many ideas. Language is always more
concrete in its earlier forms. In this period of the concrete English
language, then, the translation was made from the Hebrew, which was also a
concrete, figurative language itself. The structure of the Hebrew sentence
is very simple. There are no extended paragraphs in it. It is somewhat
different in the New Testament, where these paragraphs are found,
certainly in the Pauline Greek; but even there the extended sentences are
broken into clauses which can be taken as wholes. The English version
shows constantly the marks of the Hebrew influence in the simplicity of
its phrasing. Renan says that the Hebrew "knows how to make propositions,
but not how to link them into paragraphs." So the earlier Bible stories
are like a child's way of talking. They let one sentence follow another,
and their unity is found in the overflowing use of the word "and"--one
fact hung to another to make a story, but not to make an argument. In the
first ten chapters of I Samuel, for example, there are two hundred and
thirty-eight verses; one hundred and sixty of them begin with _and_. There
are only twenty-six of the whole which have no connective word that
thrusts them back upon the preceding verse.

In the Hebrew language, also, most of the emotions are connected either in
the word used or in the words accompanying it with the physical condition
that expresses it. Over and over we are told that "he opened his mouth and
said," or, "he was angry and his countenance fell." Anger is expressed in
words which tell of hard breathing, of heat, of boiling tumult, of
trembling. We would not trouble to say that. The opening of the mouth to
speak or the falling of the countenance in anger, we would take for
granted. The Hebrew does not. Even in the description of God you remember
the terms are those of common life; He is a shepherd when shepherds are
writing; He is a husbandman threshing out the nations, treading the
wine-press until He is reddened with the wine--and so on. That is the
natural method of the Hebrew language--concrete, vivid, never abstract,
simple in its phrasing. The King James translators are exceedingly loyal
to that original.

Professor Cook, of Yale, suggests that four traits make the Bible easy to
translate into any language: universality of interest, so that there are
apt to be words in any language to express what it means, since it
expresses nothing but what men all talk about; then, the concreteness and
picturesqueness of its language, avoiding abstract phrases which might be
difficult to reproduce in another tongue; then, the simplicity of its
structure, so that it can be taken in small bits, and long complicated
sentences are not needed; and, finally, its rhythm, so that part easily
follows part and the words catch a kind of swing which is not difficult to
imitate. That is a very true analysis. The Bible is the most easily
translated book there is, and has become the classic for more languages
than any other one book. It is brought about in part in our English
version by the faithfulness of the translators to the original.

       *       *       *       *       *

Passing from these general considerations, let us look directly at the
English Bible itself and its literary qualities. The first thing that
attracts attention is its use of words, and since words lie at the root of
all literature it is worth while to stop for them for a moment. Two things
are to be said about the words: first, that they are few; and, secondly,
that they are short. The vocabulary of the English Bible is not an
extensive one. Shakespeare uses from fifteen to twenty thousand words. In
Milton's verse he uses about thirteen thousand. In the Old Testament, in
the Hebrew and Chaldaic tongue, there are fifty-six hundred and forty-two
words. In the New Testament, in the Greek, there are forty-eight hundred.
But in the whole of the King James version there are only about six
thousand different words. The vocabulary is plainly a narrow one for a
book of its size. While, as was said before, the translators avoided using
the same word always for translation of the same original, they yet
managed to recur to the same words often enough so that this comparatively
small list of six thousand words, about one-third Shakespeare's
vocabulary, sufficed for the stating of the truth.

Then, secondly, the words are short, and in general short words are the
strong ones. The average word in the whole Bible, including the long
proper names, is barely over four letters, and if all the proper names are
excluded the average word is just a little under four letters. Of course,
another way of saying that is that the words are generally Anglo-Saxon,
and, while in the original spelling they were much longer, yet in their
sound they were as brief as they are in our present spelling. There is no
merit in Anglo-Saxon words except in the fact that they are concrete,
definite, non-abstract words. They are words that mean the same to
everybody; they are part of common experience. We shall see the power of
such words by comparing a simple statement in Saxon words from the English
Bible with a comment of a learned theologian of our own time on them. The
phrase is a simple one in the Communion service: "This is my body which is
given for you." That is all Saxon. When our theologian comes to comment on
it he says we are to understand that "the validity of the service does not
lie in the quality of external signs and sacramental representation, but
in its essential property and substantial reality." Now there are nine
words abstract in their meaning, Latin in their form. It is in that kind
of words that the Bible could have been translated, and in our own day
might even be translated. Addison speaks of that: "If any one would judge
of the beauties of poetry that are to be met with in the divine writings,
and examine how kindly the Hebrew manners of speech mix and incorporate
with the English language, after having perused the Book of Psalms, let
him read a literal translation of Horace or Pindar. He will find in these
two last such an absurdity and confusion of style with such a comparative
poverty of imagination, as will make him very sensible of what I have been
here advancing."[24]

The fact that the words are short can be quickly illustrated by taking
some familiar sections. In the Ten Commandments there are three hundred
and nineteen words in all; two hundred and fifty-nine of them are words of
one syllable, and only sixty are of two syllables and over. There are
fifty words of two syllables, six of three syllables, of which four are
such composite words that they really amount to two words of one and two
syllables each, with four words of four syllables, and none over that.

Make a comparison just here. There is a paragraph in Professor March's
lectures on the English language where he is urging that its strongest
words are purely English, not derived from Greek or Latin. He uses the
King James version as illustration. If, now, we take three hundred and
nineteen words at the beginning of that paragraph to compare with the
three hundred and nineteen in the Ten Commandments, the result will be
interesting. Where the Ten Commandments have two hundred and fifty-nine
words of one syllable, Professor March has only one hundred and
ninety-four; over against the fifty two-syllable words in the Ten
Commandments, Professor March has sixty-five; over against their six words
of three syllables, he has thirty-five; over against their four words of
four syllables, he uses eighteen; and while the Ten Commandments have no
word longer than four syllables, Professor March needs five words of five
syllables and two words of six syllables to express his ideas.[25]

The same thing appears in the familiar 23d Psalm, where there are one
hundred and nineteen words in all, of which ninety-five are words of one
syllable, and only three of three syllables, with none longer. In the
Sermon on the Mount eighty-two per cent. of the words in our English
version are words of one syllable.

The only point urged now is that this kind of thing makes for strength in
literature. Short words are strong words. They have a snap and a grip to
them that long words have not. Very few men would grow angry over having a
statement called a "prevarication" or "a disingenuous entanglement of
ideas," but there is something about the word "lie" that snaps in a man's
face. "Unjustifiable hypothecation" may be the same as stealing, but it
would never excite one to be called "an unjustifiable hypothecator" as it
does to be called a thief. At the very foundation of the strength of the
literature of the English Bible there lies this tendency to short,
clear-cut words.

Rising now from this basal element in the literature of the version, we
come to the place where its style and its ideas blend in what we may call
its earnestness. That is itself a literary characteristic. There is not a
line of trifling in the book. No man would ever learn trifling from it. It
takes itself with tremendous seriousness. Here are earnest men at work;
to them life is joyous, but it is no joke. That is why the element of
humor in it is such a small one. It is there, to be sure. Many of its
similes are intended to be humorous. A few of its incidents are humorous;
but it has little of that element in it, as indeed little of our
literature has that element markedly in it. We have a few exceptions. But
what George Eliot says in _Adam Bede_ is true, that wit is of a temporary
nature, and does not deal with the deep and more lasting elements in life.
The Bible is not a sad book. There are children at play in it; there are
feasts and buoyant gatherings fully recounted. But it never trifles nor
jests.

So it has given us a language of great dignity. Let Addison speak again:
"How cold and dead does a prayer appear that is composed in the most
elegant and polite forms of speech, which are natural to our tongue, when
it is not heightened by that solemnity of phrase which may be drawn from
the sacred writings. It has been said by some of the ancients that if the
gods were to talk with men, they would certainly speak in Plato's style;
but I think we may say, with justice, that when mortals converse with
their Creator they cannot do it in so proper a style as in that of the
Holy Scriptures."

As that earnestness of the literature of the original precluded any great
amount of humor in the wide range of its literary forms, so in the King
James version it precluded any trifling expressions, any plays on words,
even the duplication of such plays as can be found in the Hebrew or the
Greek. You seldom find any turn of a word in the King James version,
though you do occasionally find it in the Hebrew. One such punning
expression occurs in the story of Samson (Judges xv:16), where our version
reads: "With the jawbone of an ass, heaps upon heaps, with the jawbone of
an ass have I slain a thousand men." In the Hebrew the words translated
"ass" and "heaps" are variants of the same word. It comes near the Hebrew
to say: "With the jawbone of an ass, masses upon masses," and so on. These
translators would not risk reproducing such puns for fear of lowering the
dignity of their results. There is a deadly seriousness about their work
and so they never lose strength as they go on.

That earnestness grows out of a second fact which may be
emphasized--namely, the greatness of the themes of Bible literature. Here
is history, but it is not cast into fiction form. History always becomes
more interesting for a first reading when it is in the form of fiction;
but it always loses greatness in that form. Test it by turning from a
history of the American revolutionary or civil war to an historical novel
that deals with the same period; or from a history of Scotland to the
Waverley novels. In some degree the earnestness of the time is lost; the
same facts are there; but they do not loom so large, nor do they seem so
great. So there is power in the fact that the historical elements of the
version are in stately form and are never sacrificed to the fictional
form.

These great themes save the work from being local. It issues from life,
but from life considered in the large. The themes of great literature are
great enough to make their immediate surroundings forgotten. The English
Bible deals with the great facts and the great problems. It is from the
point of view of those great facts that it handles even commonplace
things, and you forget the commonplaceness of the things in the greatness
of the dealing. Take its attitude toward God. One needs the sense of that
great theme to read it fairly. It quietly overlooks secondary causes, goes
back of them to God. Partly that was because the original writers were
ignorant of some of those secondary causes; partly that they knew them,
but wanted to go farther back. Take the most outstanding instance, that of
the Book of Jonah. All its facts, without exception, can be told without
mention of God, if one cared to do it. But there could not be anything
like so great a story if it is told that way. One of his biographers says
of Lincoln that there is nothing in his whole career which calls for
explanation in other than a purely natural and human way. That is true, if
one does not care to go any farther back than that. But the greatest story
cannot be made out of Lincoln's life on those terms. There is not material
enough; the life must be delocalized. It can be told without that larger
view, so that it will be of interest to America and American children, but
not so that it will be of value to generations of men in all countries and
under all circumstances if it is told on those terms. Part of the
greatness of Scripture, from a literary point of view, is that it has such
a tremendous range of theme, and is saved from a mere narration of local
events by seeing those events in the light of larger considerations.

Let that stand for one of the great facts. Now take one of the great
problems. The thing that makes Job so great a classic is the fact that,
while it is dealing with a character, he is standing for the problem of
undeserved suffering. A man who has that before him, if he has at all the
gift of imagination, is sure to write in a far larger way than when he is
dealing with a man with boils as though he were finally important. One
could deal with Job as a character, and do a small piece of work. But when
you deal with Job as a type, a much larger opportunity offers.

It is these great ideas, as to either facts or problems, that give the
seriousness, the earnestness to the literature of the Bible. Men who
express great ideas in literary form are not dilettante about them. One of
the English writers just now prominent as an essayist is often counted
whimsical, trifling. One of his near friends keenly resents that opinion,
insists instead that he is dead in earnest, serious to the last degree,
purposeful in all his work. What makes that so difficult to believe is
that there is always a tone of chaffing in his essays. He seems always to
be making fun of himself or of other people; and if he is dead in earnest
he has the wrong style to make great literature or literature that will
live long.

It is that earnestness and greatness of theme which puts the tang into the
English of the Bible. Coleridge says that "after reading Isaiah or the
Epistle to the Hebrews, Homer and Virgil are disgustingly tame, Milton
himself barely tolerable." It need not be put quite so strongly as that;
but there is large warrant of fact in that expression.

Go a little farther in thought of the literary characteristics of the
Bible. Notice the variety of the forms involved. Recall Professor
Moulton's four cardinal points in literature, all of it taking one of
these forms: either description, when a scene is given in the words of the
author, as when Milton and Homer describe scenes without pretending to
give the words of the actors throughout; or, secondly, presentation, when
a scene is given in the words of those who took part in it, and the author
does not appear, as, of course, in the plays of Shakespeare, when he never
appears, but where all his sentiments are put in the words of others. As
between those two, the Bible is predominantly a book of description, the
authors for the most part doing the speaking, though there is, of course,
an element of presentation. Professor Moulton goes on with the two other
phases of literary form: prose, moving in the region limited by facts, as
history and philosophy deal only with what actually has existence; and
poetry, which by its Greek origin means creative literature. He reminds us
that, however literature starts, these are the points toward which it
moves, the paths it takes. All four of them appear in the literature of
the English Bible. You have more of prose and less of poetry; but the
poetry is there, not in the sense of rhyme, but in the sense of real
creative literature.

A more natural way of considering the literature has been followed by
Professor Gardiner. He finds four elements in the literature of the Bible:
its narrative, its poetry, its philosophizing, and its prophecy. It is not
necessary for our purpose to go into details about that. We shall have all
we need when we realize that, small as the volume of the book is, it yet
does cover all these types of literature. Its difference from other books
is that it deals with all of its subjects so compactly.

It will accent this fact of its variety if we note the musical element in
the literature of the Bible. It comes in part from the form which marks
the original Hebrew poetry. It has become familiar to say that it is not
of the rhyming kind. Rather it is marked by the balancing of phrases or of
ideas, so that it runs in couplets or in triplets throughout. In the
Psalms there is always a balance of clauses. They are sometimes
adversative; sometimes they are simply cumulative. Take several instances
from the 119th Psalm, each a complete stanza of Hebrew poetry; (verse 15)
"I will meditate in thy precepts, and have respect unto thy ways"; or
this (verse 23), "Princes also did sit and speak against me: but thy
servant did meditate in thy statutes"; or this (verse 45), "And I will
walk at liberty: for I seek thy precepts"; (verse 51), "The proud have had
me greatly in derision: yet have I not inclined from thy law." Each
presents a parallel or a contrast of ideas. That is the characteristic
mark of Hebrew poetry. It results in a kind of rhythm of the English which
makes it very easy to set to music. Some of it can be sung, though for
some of it only the thunder is the right accompaniment. But it is not
simply in the balance of phrases that the musical element appears.
Sometimes it is in a natural but rhythmic consecution of ideas. The 35th
chapter of Isaiah, for example, is not poetic in the Hebrew, yet it is
remarkably musical in the English. Read it aloud from our familiar
version:

     "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and
     the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom
     abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing; the glory of
     Lebanon shall be given unto it, the excellency of Carmel and
     Sharon; they shall see the glory of the Lord, and the excellency of
     our God. Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble
     knees. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong, fear
     not: behold, your God will come with vengeance, even God with a
     recompense; He will come and save you. Then the eyes of the blind
     shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf shall be unstopped. Then
     shall the lame man leap as a hart, and the tongue of the dumb sing:
     for in the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the
     desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty
     land springs of water: in the habitation of dragons, where each
     lay, shall be grass with reeds and rushes. And a highway shall be
     there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the
     unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the
     wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein. No lion shall
     be there, nor any ravenous beast shall go up thereon, it shall not
     be found there; but the redeemed shall walk there: and the ransomed
     of the Lord shall return, and come to Zion with songs and
     everlasting joy upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and
     gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away."

That can be set to music as it stands. You catch the same form in the
familiar 13th chapter of I Corinthians, the chapter on Charity. It could
be almost sung throughout. This musical element is in sharp contrast with
much else in the Scripture, where necessity does not permit that literary
form. For example, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, which is argumentative
throughout, there is no part except its quotations which has ever been
set to music for uses in Christian worship. It is rugged and protracted in
its form, and has no musical element about it. The contrast within the
Scripture of the musical and the unmusical is a very marked one.

Add to the thought of the earnestness and variety of the Scripture a word
about the simplicity of its literary expression. There is nothing
meretricious in its style. There is no effort to say a thing finely. The
translators have avoided all temptation to grow dramatic in reproducing
the original. Contrast the actual English Bible with the narratives or
other literary works that have been built up out of it. Read all that the
Bible tells about the loss of Paradise, and then read Milton's "Paradise
Lost." Nearly all of the conceptions of Milton's greatest poem are built
up from brief Scripture references. But Milton becomes subtle in his
analysis of motives; he enlarges greatly on events. Scripture never does
that. It gives us very few analyses of motive from first to last. That is
not the method nor the purpose of Scripture. It tells the story in terms
that move on the middle level of speech and the middle level of
understanding, while Milton labors with it, complicates it, entangling it
with countless details which are to the Scripture unimportant. It goes
straight to the simple and fundamental elements in the account. Take a
more modern illustration. Probably the finest poem of its length in the
English language is Browning's "Saul." It is built out of one incident and
a single expression in the Bible story of Saul and David. The incident is
David's being called from his sheep to play his harp and to sing before
Saul in the fits of gloom which overcome him; the expression is the single
saying that David loved Saul. Taking that incident and that expression,
Browning writes a beautiful poem with many decorative details, with keen
analysis of motive, with long accounts of the way David felt when he
rendered his service, and how his heart leaped or sang. Imagine finding
Browning's familiar phrases in Scripture: "The lilies we twine round the
harp-chords, lest they snap neath the stress of the noontide--those
sunbeams like swords"; "Oh, the wild joy of living!" "Spring's arrowy
summons," going "straight to the aim." That is very well for Browning, but
it is not the Scripture way; it is too complicated. All that the Bible
says can be said anywhere; Browning's "Saul" could not possibly be
reproduced in other languages. It would need a glossary or a commentary to
make it intelligible. It is beautiful English, and great because it has
taken a great idea and clothed it in worthy expression. But the simplicity
of the Bible narrative appears in sharp contrast with it. In my childhood
my father used to tell of a man who preached on the creation, and with
great detail and much elaboration and decoration told the story of
creation as it is suggested in the first chapter of Genesis. When it was
over he asked an old listener what he thought of his effort, and the only
comment was, "You can't beat Moses!" Well, it would be difficult to
surpass these Bible writers in simplicity, in going straight to the point,
and making that plain and leaving it. Where the Bible takes a hundred
words to tell the whole story Browning takes several hundred lines to tell
it.

The simplicity of the Bible is largely because there is so little abstract
reasoning in it. Having few or no abstract ideas, it does not need
abstract words. Rather, it groups its whole movement around characters.
Three eminent literary men were once asked to select the best reviews of a
novel which had just appeared. One of the three statements which they
rated highest said of the book that it "achieves the true purpose of a
novel, which is to make comprehensible the philosophy of life of a whole
community or race of men by showing us how that philosophy accords with
the impulses and yearnings of typical individuals." Few phrases could be
more foreign to Bible phrases than those. But there is valuable suggestion
in it for more than the literature of the novel. That is exactly what the
Scripture does. Its reasoning is kept concrete by the fact that it is
dealing with characters more than movements, and so it can speak in
concrete words. That always makes for simplicity.

There are two elements common to the history of literature about which a
special word is deserved. I mean the dramatic and the oratorical elements.
The difference between the dramatic and the oratorical is chiefly that in
dramatic writing there is a scene in which many take part, and in the
oratorical writing one man presents the whole scene, however dramatic the
surroundings. There is not a great deal of either in the Scripture. There
is no formal drama, nothing that could be acted as it stands. It is true,
to be sure, that Job can be cast into dramatic form by a sufficient
manipulation, but it is quite unlikely, in spite of some scholars, that it
was ever meant to be a formal drama for action. It does move in cycles in
the appearance of its characters, and it does close in a way to take one
back to the beginning. It has many marks of the drama, and yet it seems
very unlikely that it was ever prepared with that definitely in mind. On
the other hand, a most likely explanation of the Song of Solomon is that
it is a short drama which appears in our Bible without any character
names, as though you should take "Hamlet" and print it continuously,
indicating in no way the change of speakers nor any movement. The effort
has been measurably successful to discover and insert the names of the
probable speakers. That seems to be the one exception to the general
statement that there is no formal drama in the Scripture. But there are
some very striking dramatic episodes, and they are made dramatic for us
very largely by the way they are told. One of the earlier is in I Kings
xviii:21-39.

     "And Elijah came unto all the people, and said, How long halt ye
     between two opinions? if the Lord be God, follow him: but if Baal,
     then follow him. And the people answered him not a word. Then said
     Elijah unto the people, I, even I only, remain a prophet of the
     Lord; but Baal's prophets are four hundred and fifty men. Let them
     therefore give us two bullocks; and let them choose one bullock for
     themselves, and cut it in pieces, and lay it on wood, and put no
     fire under; and I will dress the other bullock, and lay it on wood,
     and put no fire under: and call ye on the name of your gods, and I
     will call on the name of the Lord: and the God that answereth by
     fire, let him be God. And all the people answered and said, It is
     well spoken. And Elijah said unto the prophets of Baal, Choose you
     one bullock for yourselves, and dress it first; for ye are many;
     and call on the name of your gods, but put no fire under. And they
     took the bullock which was given them, and they dressed it, and
     called on the name of Baal from morning until noon, saying, O Baal,
     hear us. But there was no voice, nor any that answered. And they
     leaped upon the altar which was made. And it came to pass at noon,
     that Elijah mocked them, and said, Cry aloud; for he is a god;
     either he is talking, or he is pursuing, or he is in a journey, or
     peradventure he sleepeth, and must be awakened. And they cried
     aloud, and cut themselves after their manner with knives and
     lancets, till the blood gushed out upon them. And it came to pass,
     when midday was past, and they prophesied until the time of the
     offering of the evening sacrifice, that there was neither voice,
     nor any to answer, nor any that regarded. And Elijah said unto all
     the people, Come near unto me. And all the people came near unto
     him. And he repaired the altar of the Lord that was broken down.
     And Elijah took twelve stones, according to the number of the
     tribes of the sons of Jacob, unto whom the word of the Lord came,
     saying, Israel shall be thy name. And with the stones he built an
     altar in the name of the Lord; and he made a trench about the
     altar, as great as would contain two measures of seed. And he put
     the wood in order, and cut the bullock in pieces, and laid him on
     the wood, and said, Fill four barrels with water, and pour it on
     the burnt sacrifice, and on the wood. And he said, Do it the second
     time. And they did it the second time. And he said, Do it the third
     time. And they did it the third time. And the water ran round about
     the altar; and he filled the trench also with water. And it came to
     pass at the time of the offering of the evening sacrifice, that
     Elijah the prophet came near, and said, Lord God of Abraham, Isaac,
     and of Israel, let it be known this day that thou art God in
     Israel, and that I am thy servant, and that I have done all these
     things at thy word. Hear me, O Lord, hear me, that this people may
     know that thou art the Lord God, and that thou hast turned their
     heart back again. Then the fire of the Lord fell, and consumed the
     burnt sacrifice, and the wood, and the stones, and the dust, and
     licked up the water that was in the trench. And when all the people
     saw it, they fell on their faces: and they said, The Lord, he is
     the God; the Lord, he is the God."

That is not simply a dramatic event; that is a striking telling of it. It
is more than a narrative. In narrative literature the scene is accepted as
already constructed. In dramatic literature such appeal is made to the
imagination that the reader reconstructs the scene for himself. We are not
told in this how Elijah felt, or how he acted, nor how the people as a
whole looked, nor the setting of the scene; but if one reads it with care
it makes its own setting. The scene constructs itself.

The dramatic style does not prevail at most important points of the
Scripture, because it is a fictitious style for the presenting of truth.
It inevitably suggests superficiality. Things actually do not happen in
life as they do in drama.

One of our latest biographers says that a scientific historian is always
suspicious of dramatic events.[26] They may be true, but they are more
liable to be afterthoughts, like the bright answers we could have made to
our opponents if we had only thought of them at the time. You never lose
the sense of unreality in the very construction of a drama. Life cannot be
crowded into two or three hours, and justice does not come out as the
drama makes it do. So that at most important points of the Scripture
dramatic writing does not appear. The account of the carrying away into
captivity of the children of Israel is at no point dramatic, though you
can see instantly what a great opportunity there was for it. It is simply
narrative. It is noticeable that none of the accounts of the crucifixion
is at all dramatic. They are all simply narrative. The imagination does
not immediately conjure up the scene. There may be two reasons for that.
One is that there are involved several hours in which there is no action
recorded. The other is that by the time the accounts were written the
actual events were submerged in importance by their unworded meaning. The
account of the conversion of Paul, on the other hand, brief as it is, has
at least minor dramatic elements in it. On the whole, the Old Testament is
far more dramatic than the New.

There is even less of the oratorical element in the Scripture. There is,
to be sure, a considerable amount of quotation, and men do speak at some
length, but seldom oratorically. The prophetical writings are generally
too fragmentary to suggest oratory, and the quotations in the New
Testament, especially from the preaching of our Lord, are evidently for
the most part excerpts from longer addresses than are given. There are few
of the statements of Paul, as in the 26th chapter of Acts, which could be
delivered oratorically; but here again the Old Testament is more marked
than the New. The earliest specimen of oratory is also one of the finest
specimens. It is in the 44th chapter of Genesis, and is the account of
Judah's reply to his unrecognized brother Joseph:

     "Then Judah came near unto him, and said, O my lord, let thy
     servant, I pray thee, speak a word in my lord's ears, and let not
     thine anger burn against thy servant: for thou art even as Pharoah.
     My lord asked his servants, saying, Have ye a father, or a brother?
     And we said unto my lord, We have a father, an old man, and a child
     of his old age, a little one; and his brother is dead, and he alone
     is left of his mother, and his father loveth him. And thou saidst
     unto thy servants, Bring him down unto me, that I may set mine eyes
     upon him. And we said unto my lord, The lad cannot leave his
     father: for if he should leave his father, his father would die.
     And thou saidst unto thy servant, Except your youngest brother come
     down with you, ye shall see my face no more. And it came to pass
     when we came up unto thy servant my father, we told him the words
     of my lord. And our father said, Go again and buy us a little food.
     And we said, We cannot go down; if our youngest brother be with us,
     then we will go down: for we may not see the man's face, except our
     youngest brother be with us. And thy servant my father said unto
     us, Ye know that my wife bare me two sons: and the one went out
     from me, and I said, Surely he is torn in pieces; and I saw him not
     since: and if ye take this also from me, and mischief befall him,
     ye shall bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to the grave. Now
     therefore when I come to thy servant my father, and the lad be not
     with us; seeing that his life is bound up in the lad's life; it
     shall come to pass, when he seeth that the lad is not with us, that
     he will die: and thy servants shall bring down the gray hairs of
     thy servant our father with sorrow to the grave. For thy servant
     became surety for the lad unto my father, saying, If I bring him
     not unto thee, then I shall bear the blame to my father for ever.
     Now therefore, I pray thee, let thy servant abide instead of the
     lad a bondman to my lord; and let the lad go up with his brethren.
     For how shall I go up to my father, and the lad be not with me?
     lest peradventure I see the evil that shall come on my father."

That is pure oratory, and it is greatly helped by the English expression
of it. Here our King James version is finer than either of the other later
versions, as indeed it is in almost all these sections where the
phraseology is important for the ear.

We need not go farther. Part of these outstanding characteristics come to
our version from the original, and might appear in any version of the
Bible. Yet nowhere do even these original characteristics come to such
prominence as in the King James translation; and it adds to them those
that are peculiar to itself.

FOOTNOTES:

[17] Preface, p. vii.

[18] Page 124.

[19] _Short History of the English People_, Book vii, chap. i.

[20] T. R. Eaton, _Shakespeare and the Bible_, p. 2.

[21] _Essay on John Dryden._

[22] _Historical Sketches, Hampton Court Conference._

[23] Trevelyan, _England under the Stuarts_, p. 54.

[24] _The Spectator_, No. 405.

[25] This table will show the comparison at a glance:

    Syllables        1    2    3    4   5   6
The Commandments   259   50    6    4   0   0   319
Professor March    194   65   35   18   5   2   319

[26] McGiffert, _Life of Martin Luther_.




LECTURE IV

THE INFLUENCE OF THE KING JAMES VERSION ON ENGLISH LITERATURE


The Bible is a book-making book. It is literature which provokes
literature.

It would be a pleasure to survey the whole field of literature in the
broadest sense and to note the creative power of the King James version;
but that is manifestly impossible here. Certain limitations must be
frankly made. Leave on one side, therefore, the immense body of purely
religious literature, sermons, expositions, commentaries, which, of
course, are the direct product of the Bible. No book ever caused so much
discussion about itself and its teaching. That is because it deals with
the fundamental human interest, religion. It still remains true that the
largest single department of substantial books from our English presses is
in the realm of religion, and after the purely recreative literature they
are probably most widely read. Yet, they are not what we mean at this
time by the literary result of the English Bible.

Leave on one side also the very large body of political and historical
writing. Much of it shows Bible influence. In the nature of the case, any
historian of the past three hundred years must often refer to and quote
from the English Bible, and must note its influence. An entire study could
be devoted to the influence of the English Bible on Green or Bancroft or
Freeman or Prescott--its influence on their matter and their manner.
Another could be given to its influence on political writing and speaking.
No great orator of the day would fail us of material, and the great
political papers and orations of the past would only widen the field. Yet
while some of this political and historical writing is recognized as
literature, most of it can be left out of our thought just now.

It may aid in the limiting of the field to accept what Dean Stanley said
in another connection: "By literature, I mean those great works that rise
above professional or commonplace uses and take possession of the mind of
a whole nation or a whole age."[27] This is one of the matters which we
all understand until we begin to define it; we know what we mean until
some one asks us.

The literature of which we are thinking in this narrower sense is in the
sphere of art rather than in the sphere of distinct achievement. De
Quincey's division is familiar: the literature of knowledge, and the
literature of power. The function of the first is to teach; the function
of the second is to move. Professor Dowden points out that between the two
lies a third field, the literature of criticism. It seeks both to teach
and to move. Our concern is chiefly with De Quincey's second field--the
literature of power. In the first field, the literature of knowledge, must
lie all history, with Hume and Gibbon; all science, with Darwin and Fiske;
all philosophy, with Spencer and William James; all political writing,
with Voltaire and Webster. Near that same field must lie many of those
essays in criticism of which Professor Dowden speaks. This which we omit,
this literature of knowledge, is powerful literature, though its main
purpose is not to move, but to teach. We are only reducing our field so
that we can survey it. For our uses just now we shall find pure literature
taking the three standard forms: the poem, the essay, and the story. It is
the influence of the English Bible on this large field of literature
which we are to observe.

Just for safety's sake, accept another narrowing of the field. The effect
of the Bible and its religious teaching on the writer himself is a
separate study, and is for the most part left out of consideration. It
sounds correct when Milton says: "He who would not be frustrate of his
power to write well ought himself to be a true poem." But there is Milton
himself to deal with; irreproachable in morals, there are yet the unhappy
years of his young wife to trouble us, and there were his daughters, who
were not at peace with him, and whom after their service in his blindness
he yet stigmatizes in his will as "undutiful children." Then, if you think
of Shelley or Byron, you are troubled by their lives; or even Carlyle, the
very master of the Victorian era--one would not like to scan his life
according to the laws of true poetry. Then there is Coleridge, falling a
prey to opium until, as years came, conscience and will seemed to go. Only
a very ardent Scot will feel that he can defend Robert Burns at all
points, and we would be strange Americans if we felt that Edgar Allan Poe
was a model of propriety. That is a large and interesting field, but the
Bible seems even to gain power as a book-making book when it lays hold on
the book-making proclivities of men who are not prepared to yield to its
personal power. They may get away from it as religion; they do not get
away from it as literature.

The first and most notable fact regarding the influence of the Bible on
English literature is the remarkable extent of that influence. It is
literally everywhere. If every Bible in any considerable city were
destroyed, the Book could be restored in all its essential parts from the
quotations on the shelves of the city public library. There are works,
covering almost all the great literary writers, devoted especially to
showing how much the Bible has influenced them.

The literary effect of the King James version at first was less than its
social effect; but in that very fact lies a striking literary influence.
For a long time it formed virtually the whole literature which was readily
accessible to ordinary Englishmen. We get our phrases from a thousand
books. The common talk of an intelligent man shows the effect of many
authors upon his thinking. Our fathers got their phrases from one great
book. Their writing and their speaking show the effect of that book.

It is a study by itself, and yet it is true that world literature is, as
Professor Moulton puts it, the autobiography of civilization. "A national
literature is a reflection of the national history." Books as books
reflect their authors. As literature they reflect the public opinion which
gives them indorsement. When, therefore, public opinion keeps alive a
certain group of books, there is testimony not simply to those books, but
to the public opinion which has preserved them. The history of popular
estimates of literature is itself most interesting. On the other hand,
some writers have been amusingly overestimated. No doubt Edward
Fitzgerald, who gave us the "Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" did some other
desirable work; but Professor Moulton quotes this paragraph from a popular
life of Fitzgerald, published in Dublin: "Not Greece of old in her
palmiest days--the Greece of Homer and Demosthenes, of Eschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles, of Pericles, Leonidas, and Alcibiades, of
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, of Solon and Lycurgus, of Apelles and
Praxiteles--not even this Greece, prolific as she was in sages and heroes,
can boast such a lengthy bead-roll as Ireland can of names immortal in
history!" But "this was for Irish consumption." And popular opinion and
even critical opinion has sometimes gone far astray in its destructive
tendency. There were authoritative critics who declared that Wordsworth,
Shelley, and Coleridge wrote "unintelligible nonsense." George Meredith's
style, especially in his poetry, was counted so bad that it was not worth
reading. We are all near enough the Browning epoch to recall how the
obscurity of his style impressed some and oppressed others. Alfred Austin,
in 1869, said that "Mr. Tennyson has no sound pretensions to be called a
great poet." Contemporary public opinion is seldom a final gauge of
strength for a piece of literature. It takes the test of time. How many
books we have seen come on the stage and then pass off again! Yet the
books that have stayed on the stage have been kept there by public opinion
expressing itself in the long run. The social influence of the King James
version, creating a public taste for certain types of literature, tended
to produce them at once.

English literature in these three hundred years has found in the Bible
three influential elements: style, language, and material.

First, the style of the King James version has influenced English
literature markedly. Professor Gardiner opens one of his essays with the
dictum that "in all study of English literature, if there be any one axiom
which may be accepted without question, it is that the ultimate standard
of English prose style is set by the King James version of the Bible."[28]
You almost measure the strength of writing by its agreement with the
predominant traits of this version. Carlyle's weakest works are those
that lose the honest simplicity of its style in a forced turgidity and
affected roughness. His _Heroes and Hero Worship_ or his _French
Revolution_ shows his distinctive style, and yet shows the influence of
this simpler style, while his _Frederick the Great_ is almost impossible
because he has given full play to his broken and disconnected sentences.
On the other hand, Macaulay fails us most in his striving for effect,
making nice balance of sentences, straining his "either-or," or his
"while-one-was-doing-this-the-other-was-doing-that." Then his sentences
grow involved, and his paragraphs lengthen, and he swings away from the
style of the King James version. "One can say that if any writing departs
very far from the characteristics of the English Bible it is not good
English writing."

The second element which English literature finds in the Bible is its
_language_. The words of the Bible are the familiar ones of the English
tongue, and have been kept familiar by the use of the Bible. The result is
that "the path of literature lies parallel to that of religion. They are
old and dear companions, brethren indeed of one blood; not always
agreeing, to be sure; squabbling rather in true brotherly fashion now and
then; occasionally falling out very seriously and bitterly; but still
interdependent and necessary to each other."[29] Years ago a writer
remarked that every student of English literature, or of English speech,
finds three works or subjects referred to, or quoted from, more frequently
than others. These are the Bible, tales of Greek and Roman mythology, and
_AEsop's Fables_. Of these three, certainly the Bible furnishes the largest
number of references. There is reason for that. A writer wants an
audience. Very few men can claim to be independent of the public for which
they write. There is nothing the public will be more apt to understand and
appreciate quickly than a passing reference to the English Bible. So it
comes about that when Dickens is describing the injustice of the
Murdstones to little David Copperfield, he can put the whole matter before
us in a parenthesis: "Though there was One once who set a child in the
midst of the disciples." Dickens knew that his readers would at once catch
the meaning of that reference, and would feel the contrast between the
scene he was describing and that simple scene. Take any of the great books
of literature and black out the phrases which manifestly come directly
from the English Bible, and you would mark them beyond recovery.

But English literature has found more of its material in the Bible than
anything else. It has looked there for its characters, its illustrations,
its subject-matter. We shall see, as we consider individual writers, how
many of their titles and complete works are suggested by the Bible. It is
interesting to see how one idea of the Scripture will appear and reappear
among many writers. Take one illustration. The Faust story is an effort to
make concrete one verse of Scripture: "What shall it profit a man if he
shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" Professor Moulton
reminds us that the Faust legend appeared first in the Middle Ages. In
early English, Marlowe has it, Calderon put it into Spanish, the most
familiar form of it is Goethe's, while Philip Bailey has called his
account of it _Festus_. In each of those forms the same idea occurs. A man
sells his soul to the devil for the gaining of what is to him the world.
That is one of a good many ideas which the Bible has given to literature.
The prodigal son has been another prolific source of literary writing.
The guiding star is another. Others will readily come to mind.

With that simple background let our minds move down the course of literary
history. Style, language, material--we will easily think how much of each
the Bible has given to all our great writers if their names are only
mentioned. There are four groups of these writers.

1. The Jacobean, who wrote when and just after our version was made.

2. The Georgian, who graced the reigns of the kings whose name the period
bears.

3. The Victorian.

4. The American.

There is an attractive fifth group comprising our present-day workers in
the realm of pure literature, but we must omit them and give our attention
to names that are starred.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is familiar that in the time of Elizabeth, "England became a nest of
singing birds." In the fifty years after the first English theater was
erected, the middle of Elizabeth's reign, fifty dramatic poets appeared,
many of the first order. Some were distinctly irreligious, as were many of
the people whose lives they touched. Such men as Ford, Marlowe, Massinger,
Webster, Beaumont, and Fletcher stand like a chorus around Shakespeare
and Ben Jonson as leaders. As Taine puts it: "They sing the same piece
together, and at times the chorus is equal to the solo; but only at
times."[30] Cultured people to-day know the names of most of these
writers, but not much else, and it does not heavily serve our argument to
say that they felt the Puritan influence; but they all did feel it either
directly or by reaction.

Edmund Spenser and his friend, Sir Philip Sidney, had closed their work
before the King James version appeared, yet the _Faerie Queene_ in its
religious theory is Puritan to the core, and Sidney is best remembered by
his paraphrases of Scripture. The influence of both was even greater in
the Jacobean than in their own period.

It is hardly fair even to note the Elizabethan Shakespeare as under the
influence of the King James version. The Bible influenced him markedly,
but it was the Genevan version prepared during the exile of the scholars
under Bloody Mary, or the Bishops' Bible prepared under Elizabeth. Those
versions were familiar as household facts to him. "No writer has
assimilated the thoughts and reproduced the words of Holy Scripture more
copiously than Shakespeare." Dr. Furnivall says that "he is saturated
with the Bible story," and a century ago Capel Lofft said quaintly that
Shakespeare "had deeply imbibed the Scriptures." But the King James
version appeared only five years before his death, and it is in some sense
fairer to say that Shakespeare and the King James version are formed by
the same influence as to their English style. The Bishop of St. Andrews
even devotes the first part of his book on Shakespeare and the Bible to a
study of parallels between the two in peculiar forms of speech, and thinks
it "probable that our translators of 1611 owed as much to Shakespeare as,
or rather far more than, he owed to them."[31] It is generally agreed that
only two of his works were written after our version appeared. Several
other writers have devoted separate volumes to noting the frequent use by
Shakespeare of Biblical phrases and allusions and characters taken from
early versions. It is a very tempting field, and we pass it by only
because it is hardly in the range of the study we are now making.

When, however, we come to John Milton (1608-1674), we remember he was only
three years old when our version was issued; that when at fifteen, an
undergraduate in Cambridge, he made his first paraphrases, casting two of
the Psalms into meter, the version he used was this familiar one. A
biographer says he began the day always with the reading of Scripture and
kept his memory deeply charged with its phrases. In later life the morning
chapter was generally from the Hebrew, and was followed by an hour of
silence for meditation, an exercise whose influence no man's style could
escape. As a writer he moved steadily toward the Scripture and the
religious teaching which it brought his age. His earlier writing is a
group of poems largely secular, which yet show in phrases and expressions
much of the influence of his boyhood study of the Bible, as well as the
familiar use of mythology. The memorial poem "Lycidas," for example,
contains the much-quoted reference to Peter and his two keys--

    "Last came and last did go
    The pilot of the Galilean lake;
    Two massy keys he bore of metals twain,
    (The golden opes, the iron shuts amain)."

But after these poems came the period of his prose, the work which he
supposed was the abiding work of his life. George William Curtis told a
friend that our civil war changed his own literary style: "That roused me
to see that I had no right to spend my life in literary leisure. I felt
that I must throw myself into the struggle for freedom and the Union. I
began to lecture and to write. The style took care of itself. But I fancy
it is more solid than it was thirty years ago." That is what happened to
Milton when the protectorate came.[32] It made his style more solid. He
did not mean to live as a poet. He felt that his best energies were being
put into his essays in defense of liberty, on the freedom of the press and
on the justice of the beheading of Charles, in which service he sacrificed
his sight. All of it is shot through with Scripture quotations and
arguments, and some of it, at least, is in the very spirit of Scripture.
The plea for larger freedom of divorce issued plainly from his own bitter
experience; but his main argument roots in a few Bible texts taken out of
their connection and urged with no shadow of question of their authority.
Indeed, when he comes to his more religious essays, his heavy argument is
that there should be no religion permitted in England which is not drawn
directly from the Bible; which, therefore, he urges must be common
property for all the people. There is a curious bit of evidence that the
men of his own time did not realize his power as a poet. In Pierre
Bayle's critical survey of the literature of the time, he calls Milton
"the famous apologist for the execution of Charles I.," who "meddled in
poetry and several of whose poems saw the light during his life or after
his death!" For all that, Milton was only working on toward his real
power, and his power was to be shown in his service to religion. His three
great poems, in the order of their value, are, of course, "Paradise Lost,"
"Samson Agonistes," and "Paradise Regained." Whoever knows anything of
Milton knows these three and knows they are Scriptural from first to last
in phrase, in allusion, and, in part at least, in idea. There is not time
for extended illustration. One instance may stand for all, which shall
illustrate how Milton's mind was like a garden where the seeds of
Scripture came to flower and fruit. He will take one phrase from the Bible
and let it grow to a page in "Paradise Lost." Here is an illustration
which comes readily to hand. In the Genesis it is said that "the spirit of
God moved on the face of the waters." The verb suggests the idea of
brooding. There is only one other possible reference (Psalm xxiv:2) which
is included in this statement which Milton makes out of that brief word in
the Genesis:

                  "On the watery calm
    His broadening wings the Spirit of God outspread,
    And vital virtue infused, and vital warmth
    Throughout the fluid mass, but downward purged
    The black tartareous cold infernal dregs,
    Adverse to life; then formed, then con-globed,
    Like things to like; the rest to several place
    Disparted, and between spun out the air--
    And earth self-balanced on her center swung."

Any one familiar with Milton will recognize that as a typical instance of
the way in which a seed idea from the Scripture comes to flower and fruit
in him. The result is that more people have their ideas about heaven and
hell from Milton than from the Bible, though they do not know it.

It seems hardly fair to use John Bunyan (1628-1688) as an illustration of
the influence of the English Bible on literature, because his chief work
is composed so largely in the language of Scripture. _Pilgrim's Progress_
is the most widely read book in the English language after the Bible. Its
phrases, its names, its matter are either directly or indirectly taken
from the Bible. It has given us a long list of phrases which are part of
our literary and religious capital. Thackeray took the motto of one of his
best-known books from the Bible; but the title, _Vanity Fair_, comes from
_Pilgrim's Progress_. When a discouraged man says he is "in the slough of
despond," he quotes Bunyan; and when a popular evangelist tells the people
that the burden of sin will roll away if they look at the cross,
"according to the Bible," he ought to say according to Bunyan. But all
this was only the outcome of the familiarity of Bunyan with the Scripture.
It was almost all he did know in a literary way. Macaulay says that "he
knew no language but the English as it was spoken by the common people; he
had studied no great model of composition, with the exception of our noble
translation of the Bible. But of that his knowledge was such that he might
have been called a living concordance."[33]

After these three--Shakespeare, Milton, and Bunyan--there appeared another
three, very much their inferiors and having much less influence on
literary history. I mean Dryden, Addison, and Pope. It is not necessary to
credit the Scripture with much of Dryden's spirit, nor with much of his
style, and certainly not with his attitude toward his fellows; but it is a
constant surprise in reading Dryden to discover how familiar he was with
the King James version. Walter Scott insists that Dryden was at heart
serious, that "his indelicacy was like the forced impudence of a bashful
man." That is generous judgment. But there is this to be said: as he grows
more serious he falls more into Bible words. If he writes a political
pamphlet he calls it "Absalom and Ahithophel." In it he holds the men of
the day up to scorn under Bible names. They are Zimri and Shimei, and the
like. When he is falling into bitterest satire, his writing abounds in
these Biblical allusions which could be made only by one who was very
familiar with the Book. Quotations cannot be abundant, of course, but
there is a great deal of this sort of thing:

    "Sinking, he left his drugget robe behind,
    Borne upward by a subterranean wind,
    The mantle fell to the young prophet's part,
    With double portion of his father's art."

In his Epistles there is much of the same sort. When he writes to Congreve
he speaks of the fathers, and says:

    "Their's was the giant race before the flood."

Farther on he says:

    "Our builders were with want of genius curst,
    The second temple was not like the first."

Now Dryden may have been, as Macaulay said, an "illustrious renegade," but
all his writing shows the influence of the language and the ideas of the
King James version. Whenever we sing the "Veni Creator" we sing John
Dryden.

So we sing Addison in the paraphrase of Scripture, which Haydn's music has
made familiar:

    "The spacious firmament on high,
    With all the blue ethereal sky."

While Dryden yielded to his times, Addison did not, and the _Spectator_
became not only a literary but a moral power. In the effort to make it so
he was thrown back on the largest moral influence of the day, the Bible,
and throughout the _Spectator_ and through all of Addison's writing you
find on all proper occasions the Bible pressed to the front. Here again
Taine puts it strikingly: "It is no small thing to make morality
fashionable; Addison did it, and it remains fashionable."

If we speak of singing, we may remember that we sing the hymn of even poor
little dwarfed invalid Alexander Pope. He was born the year Bunyan died,
born at cross-purposes with the world. He could write a bitter satire,
like the "Dunciad"; he could give the world The Iliad and The Odyssey in
such English that we know them far better than in the Greek of Homer; but
in those rare moments when he was at his better self he would write his
greater poem, "The Messiah," in which the movement of Scripture is
outlined as it could be only by one who knew the English Bible. And when
we sing--

    "Rise, crowned with light, imperial Salem, rise"--

it is worth while to realize that the voice that first sung it was that of
the irritable little poet who found some of his scant comfort in the grand
words and phrases and ideas of our English Bible.

With these six--Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan, Dryden, Addison, and
Pope--the course of the Jacobean literature is sufficiently measured.
There are many lesser names, but these are the ones which made it an epoch
in literature, and these are at their best under the power of the Bible.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the Georgian group we need to call only five great names which have had
creative influence in literature. Ordinary culture in literature will
include some acquaintance with each of them. In the order of their death
they are Shelley (1822), Byron (1824), Coleridge (1831), Walter Scott
(1832), and Wordsworth (1850). The last long outlived the others; but he
belongs with them, because he was born earlier than any other in the group
and did his chief work in their time and before the later group appeared.
Except Wordsworth, all these were gone before Queen Victoria came to the
throne in 1837. Three other names could be called: Keats, Robert Burns,
and Charles Lamb. All would illustrate what we are studying. Keats least
of all and Burns most. They are omitted here not because they did not feel
the influence of the English Bible, not because they do not constantly
show its influence, but because they are not so creative as the others;
they have not so influenced the current of literature. At any rate, the
five named will represent worthily and with sufficient completeness the
Georgian period of English literature.

Nothing could reveal more clearly than this list how we are distinguishing
the Bible as literature from the Bible as an authoritative book in morals.
One would much dislike to credit the Bible with any part of the personal
life of Shelley or Byron. They were friends; they were geniuses; but they
were both badly afflicted with common moral leprosy. It is playing with
morals to excuse either of them because he was a genius. Nothing in the
genius of either demanded or was served by the course of cheap immorality
which both practised. It was not because Shelley was a genius that he
married Harriet Westbrook, then ran away with Mary Godwin, then tried to
get the two to become friends and neighbors until his own wife committed
suicide; it was not his genius that made him yield to the influence of
Emilia Viviani and write her the poem "Epipsychidion," telling her and the
world that he "was never attached to that great sect who believed that
each one should select out of the crowd a mistress or a friend" and let
the rest go. That was not genius, that was just common passion; and our
divorce courts are full of Shelleys of that type. So Byron's personal
immorality is not to be explained nor excused on the ground of his genius.
It was not genius that led him so astray in England that his wife had to
divorce him, and that public opinion drove him out of the land. It was not
his genius that sent him to visit Shelley and his mistress at Lake Geneva
and seduce their guest, so that she bore him a daughter, though she was
never his wife. It was not genius that made him pick up still another
companion out of several in Italy and live with her in immoral relation.
In the name of common decency let no one stand up for Shelley and Byron in
their personal characters! There are not two moral laws, one for geniuses
and one for common people. Byron, at any rate, was never deceived about
himself, never blamed his genius nor his conscience for his wrong. These
are striking lines in "Childe Harold," in which he disclaims all right to
sympathy, because,

    "The thorns which I have reaped are of the tree
    I planted,--they have torn me and I bleed.
    I should have known what fruit would spring from such a tree."

Shelley's wife would not say that for him. "In all Shelley did," she says,
"he at the time of doing it believed himself justified to his own
conscience." Well, so much the worse for Shelley! Geniuses are not the
only men who can find good reason for doing what they want to do. One of
Shelley's critics suggests that the trouble was his introduction into
personal conduct of the imagination which he ought to have saved for his
writing. Perhaps we might explain Byron's misconduct by reminding
ourselves of his club-foot, and applying one code of morals to men with
club-feet and another to men with normal feet.

If we speak of the influence of the Bible on these men, it must be on
their literary work; and when we find it there, it becomes peculiar mark
of its power. They had little sense of it as moral law. Their consciences
approved it and condemned themselves, or else their delicate literary
taste sensed it as a book of power.

This is notably true of Shelley. When he was still a student in Oxford he
committed himself to the opinion of another writer, that "the mind cannot
believe in the existence of God." He tries to work that out fully in his
notes on "Queen Mab." When he was hardly yet of age he himself wrote that
"The genius of human happiness must tear every leaf from the accursed Book
of God, ere man can read the inscription on its heart." He once said that
his highest desire was that there should be a monument to himself
somewhere in the Alps which should be only a great stone with its face
smoothed and this short inscription cut in it, "Percy Bysshe Shelley,
Atheist."

It would seem that whatever Shelley drew of strength or inspiration from
the Bible would be by way of reaction; but it is not so. However he may
have hated the "accursed Book of God," his wife tells in her note on "The
Revolt of Islam" that Shelley "debated whether he should devote himself
to poetry or metaphysics," and, resolving on the former, he "educated
himself for it, engaging himself in the study of the poets of Greece,
England, and Italy. To these, may be added," she goes on, "a constant
perusal of portions of the Old Testament, the Book of Psalms, Job, Isaiah,
and others, the sublime poetry of which filled him with delight." Not only
did he catch the spirit of that poetry, but its phrases haunted his
memory. In his best prose work, which he called _A Defense of Poetry_,
there is an interesting revelation of the influence of his Bible reading
upon him. Toward the end of the essay these two sentences occur: "It is
inconsistent with this division of our subject to cite living poets, but
posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their
errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if
their sins are as scarlet, they are now white as snow; they have been
washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time." There is no more
eloquent passage in the essay than the one of which this is part, and yet
it is full of allusion to this Book from which all pages must be torn!
Even in "Queen Mab" he makes Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, recount the
Bible story in such broad outlines as could be given only by a man who
was familiar with it. When Shelley was in Italy and the word came to him
of the massacre at Manchester, he wrote his "Masque of Anarchy." There are
few more melodious lines of his writing than those which occur in this
long poem in the section regarding freedom. Four of those lines are often
quoted. They are at the very heart of Shelley's best work. Addressing
freedom, he says:

    "Thou art love: the rich have kissed
    Thy feet, and, like him following Christ,
    Gave their substance to the free,
    And through the rough world follow thee."

Page after page of Shelley reveals these half-conscious references to the
Bible. There were two sources from which he received his passionate
democracy. One was the treatment he received at Eton, and later at Oxford;
the other is his frequent reading of the English Bible, even though he was
in the spirit of rebellion against much of its teaching. In Browning's
essay on Shelley, he reaches the amazing conclusion that "had Shelley
lived, he would finally have ranged himself with the Christians," and
seeks to justify it by showing that he was moving straight toward the
positions of Paul and of David. Some of us may not see such rapid
approach, but that Shelley felt the drawing of God in the universe is
plain enough.

The influence of the Bible is still more marked on Byron. He spent his
childhood years at Aberdeen. There his nurse trained him in the Bible;
and, though he did not live by it, he never lost his love for it, nor his
knowledge of it. He tells of his own experience in this way: "I am a great
reader of those books [the Bible], and had read them through and through
before I was eight years old; that is to say, the Old Testament, for the
New struck me as a task, but the other as a pleasure."[34] One of the
earliest bits of his work is a paraphrase of one of the Psalms. His
physical infirmity put him at odds with the world, while his striking
beauty drew to him a crowd of admirers who helped to poison every spring
of his genius. Even so, he held his love for the Bible. While Shelley
often spoke of it in contempt, while he prided himself on his divergence
from the path of its teaching, Byron never did. He wandered far, but he
always knew it; and, though he could hardly find terms to express his
contempt for the Church, there is no line of Byron's writing which is a
slur at the Bible. On the other hand, much of his work reveals a passion
for the beauty of it as well as its truth. His most melodious writing is
in that group of Hebrew melodies which were written to be sung. They
demand far more than a passing knowledge of the Bible both for their
writing and their understanding. There is a long list of them, but no one
without a knowledge of the Bible would have known what he meant by his
poem, "The Harp the Monarch Minstrel Swept." "Jephtha's Daughter" presumes
upon a knowledge of the Old Testament story which would not come to one in
a passing study of the Bible. "The Song of Saul Before his Last Battle"
and the poem headed "Saul" could not have been written, nor can they be
read intelligently by any one who does not know his Bible. Among Byron's
dramas, two of which he thought most, were, "Heaven and Earth" and "Cain."
When he was accused of perverting the Scripture in "Cain," he replied that
he had only taken the Scripture at its face value. Both of the dramas are
not only built directly out of Scriptural events, but imply a far wider
knowledge of Scripture than their mere titles suggest.

There are striking references in many other poems, even in his almost vile
poem, "Don Juan." The most notable instance is in the fifteenth canto,
where he is speaking of persecuted sages and these lines occur:

    "Was it not so, great Locke? and greater Bacon?
    Great Socrates? And Thou Diviner still,
    Whose lot it is by men to be mistaken,
    And Thy pure creed made sanction of all ill?
    Redeeming worlds to be by bigots shaken,
    How was Thy toil rewarded?"

In a note on this passage Byron says: "As it is necessary in these times
to avoid ambiguity, I say that I mean by 'Diviner still' _Christ_. If ever
God was man--or man God--He was both. I never arraigned His creed, but the
use or abuse of it. Mr. Canning one day quoted Christianity to sanction
slavery, and Mr. Wilberforce had little to say in reply. And was Christ
crucified that black men might be scourged? If so, He had better been born
a mulatto, to give both colors an equal chance of freedom, or at least
salvation." Byron could live far from the influence of the Bible in his
personal life; but he never escaped its influence in his literary work.

Of Coleridge less needs to be said, because we think of him so much in
terms of his more meditative musings, which are often religious. He
himself tells of long and careful rereadings of the English Bible until he
could say: In the Bible "there is more that finds me than I have
experienced in all other books together; the words of the Bible find me at
greater depths of my being." Of course, that would influence his writing,
and it did. Even in the "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" much of the
phraseology is Scriptural. When the albatross drew near,

    "As if it had been a Christian soul,
    We hailed it in God's name."

When the mariner slept he gave praise to Mary, Queen of Heaven. He sought
the shriving of the hermit-priest. He ends the story because he hears "the
little vesper bell" which bids him to prayer. When you read his "Hymn
Before Sunrise in the Vale of Chamounix" you find yourself reading the
Nineteenth Psalm. He calls on the motionless torrents and the silent
cataracts and the great Mont Blanc itself to praise God. Coleridge never
had seen Chamounix, nor Mont Blanc, nor a glacier, but he knew his Bible.
So he has his Christmas Carol along with all the rest. His poem of the
Moors after the Civil War under Philip II. is Scriptural in its
phraseology, and so is much else that he wrote. Frankly and willingly he
yielded to its influence. In his "Table Talk" he often refers to the value
of the Bible in the forming of literary style. Once he said: "Intense
study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar in point of
style."[35]

The very mention of Coleridge makes one think of Wordsworth. They had a
Damon and Pythias friendship. The Wordsworths were poor; they had only
seventy pounds a year, and they were not ashamed. Coleridge called them
the happiest family he ever saw. Wordsworth was not narrowly a Christian
poet, he was not always seeking to put Christian dogma into poetry, but
throughout he was expressing the Christian spirit which he had learned
from the Bible. His poetry was one long protest against banishing God from
the universe. It was literally true of him that "the meanest flower that
grows can give thoughts that too often lie too deep for tears." If this
were the time to be critical, one would think that too much was sometimes
made of very minute occurrences; but this tendency to get back of the
event and see how God is moving is learned best from Scripture, where
Wordsworth himself learned it. If you read his "Intimations of
Immortality," or the "Ode to Duty," or "Tintern Abbey," or even the rather
labored "Excursion," you find yourself under the Scriptural influence.

There remains in this Georgian group the great prose master, Walter Scott.
Mr. Gladstone said he thought Scott the greatest of his countrymen. John
Morley suggested John Knox instead. Mr. Gladstone replied: "No, the line
must be drawn firmly between the writer and the man of action--no
comparison there."[36] He went on to say that Burns is very fine and true,
no doubt, "but to imagine a whole group of characters, to marshal them, to
set them to work, and to sustain the action, I must count that the test of
highest and most diversified quality." All who are fond of Scott will
realize how constantly the scenes which he is describing group themselves
around religious observances, how often men are held in check from deeds
of violence by religious conception. Many of these scenes crystallize
around a Scriptural event. Scott's boyhood was spent in scenes that
reminded him of the power the Scripture had. He was drilled from his
childhood in the knowledge of its words and phrases, and while his writing
as a whole shows more of the Old Testament influence than of the New, even
in his style he is strongly under Bible influence.

The preface to _Guy Mannering_ tells us it is built around an old story of
a father putting a lad to test under guidance of an ancient astrologer,
shutting him up in a barren room to be tempted by the Evil One, leaving
him only one safeguard, a Bible, lying on the table in the middle of the
room. In his introduction to _The Heart of Midlothian_, Scott makes one of
the two men thrown into the water by the overturned coach remind the other
that they "cannot complain, like Cowley, that Gideon's fleece remains dry
while all around is moist; this is the reverse of the miracle." A little
later a speaker describes novels as the Delilahs that seduce wise and good
men from more serious reading. In the dramatic scene when Jeanie Deans
faces the wretched George Staunton, who has so shamed the household, she
exclaims: "O sir, did the Scripture never come into your mind, 'Vengeance
is mine, and I will repay it?'" "Scripture!" he sneers, "why I had not
opened a Bible for five years." "Wae's me, sir," said Jeanie--"and a
minister's son, too!" Anthony Foster, in _Kenilworth_, looks down on poor
Amy's body in the vault into which she has fallen, in response to what she
thought was Leicester's whistle, and exclaims to Varney: "Oh, if there be
judgment in heaven, thou hast deserved it, and will meet it! Thou hast
destroyed her by means of her best affections--it is the seething of the
kid in the mother's milk!" And when, next morning, Varney was found dead
of the secret poison and with a sneering sarcasm on his ghastly face,
Scott dismisses him with the phrase: "The wicked man, saith the
Scripture, hath no bonds in his death."

His characters use freely the familiar Bible events and phrases. In the
_Fortunes of Nigel_, a story of the very period when our King James
version was produced, Hildebrod declares that if he had his way Captain
Peppercull should hang as high as Haman ever did. In _Kenilworth_, when
Leicester gives Varney his signet-ring, he says, significantly: "What thou
dost, do quickly." Of course, Isaac, the Jew in _Ivanhoe_, exclaims
frequently in Old Testament terms. He wishes the wheels of the chariots of
his enemies may be taken off, like those of the host of Pharoah, that they
may drive heavily. He expects the Palmer's lance to be as powerful as the
rod of Moses, and so on.

Scott was writing of the period when men stayed themselves with Scripture,
and his men are all sure of God and Satan and angels and judgment and all
eternal things. His son-in-law vouches for the old story that when Sir
Walter was on his death-bed he asked Lockhart to read him something from
the Book, and when Lockhart asked, "What book?" Scott replied: "Why do you
ask? There is but one book, the Bible."

All this is scant justice to the Georgian group; but it may give a hint
of what the Bible meant even at that period, the period when its grip on
men was most lax in all the later English history.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is in the Victorian age (1840-1900) that the field is most bewildering.
It is true, as Frederick Harrison says, that "this Victorian age has no
Shakespeare or Milton, no Bacon or Hume, no Fielding or Scott--no supreme
master in poetry, philosophy, or romance whose work is incorporated with
the thought of the world, who is destined to form an epoch, to endure for
centuries."[37] The genius of the period is more scientific than literary,
yet we would be helpless if we had not already eliminated from our
discussion everything but the works and writers of pure literature. The
output of books has been so tremendous that it would be impossible to
analyze the influences which have made them. There are in this Victorian
period at least twelve great English writers who must be known, whose work
affects the current of English literature. Many other names would need
mention in any full history or any minute study; but it is not harsh
judgment to say that the main current of literature would be the same
without them.

A few of these lesser names will come to mind, and in the calling of them
one realizes the influence, even on them, of the English Bible. Anthony
Trollope wrote sixty volumes, the titles of most of which are now
popularly unknown. He told George Eliot that it was not brains that
explained his writing so much, but rather wax which he put in the seat of
his chair, which held him down to his daily stint of work. He could boast,
and it was worth the boasting, that he had never written a line which a
pure woman could not read without a blush. His whole Framley Parsonage
series abounds in Bible references and allusions. So Charlotte Bronte is
in English literature, and _Jane Eyre_ does prove what she was meant to
prove, that a commonplace person can be made the heroine of a novel; but
on all Charlotte Bronte's work is the mark of the rectory in which she
grew up. So Thomas Grey has left his "Elegy" and his "Hymn to Adversity,"
and some other writing which most of us have forgotten or never knew. Then
there are Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen. We may even remember that
Macaulay thought Jane Austen could be compared with Shakespeare, as, of
course, she can be, since any one can be; but neither of these good women
has strongly affected the literary current. Many others could be named,
but English literature would be substantially the same without them; and,
though all might show Biblical influence, they would not illustrate what
we are trying to discover. So we come, without apology to the unnamed, to
the twelve, without whom English literature would be different. This is
the list in the order of the alphabet: Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning
(Mrs. Browning being grouped as one with him), Carlyle, Dickens, George
Eliot, Charles Kingsley, Macaulay, Ruskin, Robert Louis Stevenson,
Swinburne, Tennyson, and Thackeray.

It is dangerous to make such a list; but it can be defended. Literary
history would not be the same without any one of them, unless possibly
Swinburne, whose claim to place is rather by his work as critic than as
creator. Nor is any name omitted whose introduction would change literary
history.

Benjamin Jowett thought Arnold too flippant on religious things to be a
real prophet. At any rate, this much is true, that the books in which
Arnold dealt with the fundamentals of religion are his profoundest work.
In his poetry the best piece of the whole is his "Rugby Chapel." His
_Religion and Dogma_ he himself calls an "essay toward a better
apprehension of the Bible." All through he urges it as the one Book which
needs recovery. "All that the churches can say about the importance of the
Bible and its religion we concur in." The book throughout is an effort to
justify his own faith in terms of the Bible. The effort is sometimes
amusing, because it takes such a logical and verbal agility to go from one
to the other; but he is always at it. He is afraid in his soul that
England will swing away from the Bible. He fears it may come about through
neglect of the Bible on one hand, or through wrong teaching about it on
the other. Not in his ideas alone, but markedly in his style, Arnold has
felt the Biblical influence. He came at a time when there was strong
temptation to fall into cumbrous German ways of speech. Against that
Arnold set a simple phraseology, and he held out the English Bible
constantly as a model by which the men of England ought to learn to write.
He never gained the simplicity of the old Hebrew sentence, and sometimes
his secondary clauses follow one another so rapidly that a reader is
confused; but his words as a whole are simple and direct.

There is no need of much word on the spell of the Bible over Robert
Browning and Mrs. Browning. It is not often that two singing-birds mate;
but these two sang in a key pitched for them by the Scripture as much as
by any one influence. Many of their greatest poems have definite Biblical
themes. In them and in others Biblical allusions are utterly bewildering
to men who do not know the Bible well. For five years (1841-1846)
Browning's poems appeared under the title _Bells and Pomegranates_. Scores
of people wondered then, and wonder still, what "Pippa Passes" and "A Blot
in the Scutcheon" and the others have to do with such a title. They have
never thought, as Browning did, of the border of the beautiful robe of the
high priest described in the Book of Exodus. The finest poem of its length
in the English language is Browning's "Saul"; but it is only the story of
David driving the evil spirit from Saul, sweeping on to the very coming of
Christ. "The Death in the Desert" is the death of John, the beloved
disciple. "Karshish, the Arab Physician" tells in his own way of the
raising of Lazarus. The text of "Caliban upon Setebos" is, "Thou
thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself." The text of
"Cleon" is, "As certain of your own poets have said." In "Fifine at the
Fair" the Cure expounds the experience of Jacob and his stone-pillow with
better insight than some better-known expositors show. In "Pippa Passes,"
when Bluphocks, the English vagabond, is introduced, Browning seems to
justify his appearance by the single foot-note: "He maketh His sun to rise
on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the
unjust"; and Mr. Bluphocks shows himself amusingly familiar with Bible
facts and phrases. Mr. Sludge, "the Medium," thinks the Bible says the
stars are "set for signs when we should shear sheep, sow corn, prune
trees," and describes the skeptic in the magic circle of spiritual
"investigators" as the "guest without the wedding-garb, the doubting
Thomas." Some one has taken the trouble to count five hundred Biblical
phrases or allusions in "The Ring and the Book." Mrs. Browning's "Drama of
Exile" is the woman's side of the fall of Adam and Eve. Ruskin thought her
"Aurora Leigh" the greatest poem the century had produced at that time. It
abounds in Scriptural allusions. Browning came by all this naturally.
Raised in the Church by a father who "delighted to surround him with
books, notably old and rare Bibles," and a mother Carlyle called "a true
type of a Scottish gentlewoman," with all the skill in the Bible that that
implies, he never lost his sense of the majesty of the movement of
Scripture ideas and phrases.

We need spend little time in discussing the influence of the English Bible
on Thomas Carlyle. He does not often use the Scripture for his main
theme; but he is constantly making Biblical allusions. On a railway
journey when I was rereading Carlyle's _Historical Sketches_, I found a
direct Biblical reference for every five pages, and almost numberless
allusions beside.

The "Everlasting Yea," of which he says much, he gets, as you at once
recognize, from the Scripture. His "Heroes and Hero Worship" is based on
an idea of heroism which he learned from the Bible. He is an Old Testament
prophet of present times; and, while he degenerated into a scold before he
was through with it, he yet spoke with the thunderous voice of a true
prophet, and much of the time in the language of the prophets. Some one
said once that the only real reverence Carlyle ever had was for the person
of Christ. Certainly there is no note of sneer, but of the profoundest
regard for the teaching, the ideas and the history of the Scripture.

The name of Charles Dickens suggests a different atmosphere. He is a New
Testament prophet. Where Carlyle has caught the spirit of rugged power in
the Old Testament, Dickens has caught the sense of kindly love in the New
Testament. Dickens's love for the child, the fact that he could draw
children as he could draw no one else and make them lovable, suggests the
value to him of those frequent references which he makes to Christ setting
a child in the midst of the disciples. It is notable, too, how often
Dickens uses the great Scripture phrases for his most dramatic climaxes.
There are not in literature many finer uses of Scripture than the scene in
_Bleak House_, where the poor waif Joe is dying, and while his friend
teaches him the Lord's Prayer he sees the light coming. A Christmas season
without Dickens's _Christmas Carol_ would be incomplete; but there again
is the Scripture idea pressed forward.

George Eliot surely, if any writer, was under the spell of the Scripture.
One of her critics calls her the historian of conscience. All of her
heroes and heroines know the lash of the law. She knows very little about
the New Testament, one would judge; but the one thing about which she has
no doubt is certainly the reign of moral law. If a man will not yield to
its power, it will break him. There is no such thing as breaking the moral
law; there is nothing but being broken by it. Her characters are always
quoting the Bible. They preach a great deal. She tells that she herself
wrote Dinah Morris's sermon on the green with tears in her eyes. She meant
it all. While her own religious faith was clouded, her finest characters
are never clouded in their religious faith, and she grounds their faith
quite invariably on their early training in the Scripture. It is an
interesting fact that George Eliot has no principal story which has not in
it a church, and a priest or a preacher, with all that they involve.

Charles Kingsley is grouped hardly fairly in this list, because he was
himself a preacher, and naturally all his work would feel the power of the
Book, which he chiefly studied. Professor Masson says that "there is not
one of his novels which has not the power of Christianity for its theme."
No voice was raised more effectively for the beginning of the new social
era in England than his. _Alton Locke_ and _Yeast_ are epoch-making books
in the life of the common people of England. Even _Hypatia_, which is
supposed to have been written to represent entirely pagan surroundings, is
full of Bible phrases and ideas.

Lord Macaulay had been held up for many a day as one of the masters of
style. Such great writing is not to be traced to any one influence. It
could not have been easy to write as Macaulay wrote. Thackeray may have
exaggerated in saying that Macaulay read twenty books to write a sentence,
and traveled a hundred miles to make a description; but all his writing
shows the power of taking infinite pains. It becomes the more important,
therefore, that Macaulay held the Bible in such estimate as he did. "In
calling upon Lady Holland one day, Lord Macaulay was led to bring the
attention of his fair hostess to the fact that the use of the word
'talent' to mean gifts or powers of the mind, as when we speak of men of
talent, came from the use of the word in Christ's parable of the talents.
In a letter to his sister Hannah he describes the incident, and says that
Lady Holland was evidently ignorant of the parable. 'I did not tell her,'
he adds, 'though I might have done so, that a person who professes to be a
critic in the delicacies of the English language ought to have the Bible
at his fingers' ends.'" That Macaulay practised his own preaching you
would quickly find by referring to his essays. Take three sentences from
the Essay on Milton: "The principles of liberty were the scoff of every
growing courtier, and the Anathema Maranatha of every fawning dean. In
every high place worship was paid to Charles and James, Belial and Moloch,
and England propitiated these obscene and cruel idols with the blood of
her best and brightest children. Crime succeeded to crime, and disgrace to
disgrace, until the race, accursed of God and man, was a second time
driven forth to wander on the face of the earth and to be a by-word and a
shaking of the head to the nations." In three sentences here are six
allusions to Scripture. In that same essay, in the paragraphs on the
Puritans, the allusions are a multitude. They are not even quoted. They
are taken for granted. In his Essay on Machiavelli, though the subject
does not suggest it, he falls into Scriptural phrases over and over.
Listen to this, "A time was at hand when all the seven vials of the
Apocalypse were to be poured forth and shaken out over those pleasant
countries"; or this, "All the curses pronounced of old against Tyre seemed
to have fallen on Venice. Her merchants already stood afar off lamenting
for their great city"; or this, "In the energetic language of the prophet,
Machiavelli was mad for the sight of his eyes which he saw."

And if Macaulay is baffling in the abundance of material, surely John
Ruskin is worse. Carlyle's English style ran into excess of roughness;
Macaulay's ran into excess of balance and delicacy. John Ruskin's
continued to be the smoothest, easiest style in our English literature. He
also was a Hebraic spirit, but of the gentler type. Mr. Chapman calls him
the Elisha to Carlyle's Elijah, a capital comparison.[38] Ruskin is one
of the few writers who have told us what formed their style. In the first
chapter of _Praeterita_ he pays tribute to his mother. He himself chose to
read Walter Scott and Pope's Homer; but he says: "My mother forced me by
steady daily toil to learn long chapters of the Bible by heart, as well as
to read it, every syllable aloud, hard names and all, from Genesis to the
Apocalypse about once a year; and to that discipline--patient, accurate,
and resolute--I owe not only a knowledge of the Book which I find
occasionally serviceable, but much of my general power of taking pains and
the best part of my taste in literature." He thinks reading Scott might
have led to other novels of a poorer sort. Reading Pope might have led to
Johnson's or Gibbon's English; but "it was impossible to write entirely
superficial and formal English" while he knew "by heart the thirty-second
of Deuteronomy, the fifteenth of 1 Corinthians, the One hundred and
nineteenth Psalm, or the Sermon on the Mount." In the second chapter of
_Praeterita_ he is even more explicit. "I have next with deeper gratitude
to chronicle what I owed to my mother for the resolute persistent lessons
which so exercised me in the Scripture, as to make every word of them
familiar in my ear as habitual music, yet in that familiarity reverenced
as transcending all thought and ordering all conduct." He tells how his
mother drilled him. As soon as he could read she began a course of Bible
work with him. They read alternate verses from the Genesis to the
Revelation, names and all. Daily he had to commit verses of the Scripture.
He hated the One hundred and nineteenth Psalm most; but he lived to
cherish it most. In his old Bible he found the list of twenty-six chapters
taught by his mother.

Not only was Ruskin well trained in the Bible, but he was a great teacher
of it. In his preface to the _Crown of Wild Olives_ he answers his critics
by saying he has used the Book for some forty years. "My endeavor has been
uniformly to make men read it more deeply than they do; trust it, not in
their own favorite verses only, but in the sum of it all; treat it not as
a fetish or a talisman which they are to be saved by daily repetition of,
but as a Captain's order, to be held and obeyed at their peril." In the
introduction to the _Seven Lamps of Architecture_ he urges that we are in
no danger of too much use of the Bible. "We use it most reverently when
most habitually." Many of Ruskin's most striking titles come straight out
of the Scripture. _Crown of Wild Olives_, _Seven Lamps_, _Unto this
Last_--all these are suggested by the Bible.

It is almost superfluous to speak of Robert Louis Stevenson. John Kelman
has written a whole book on the religion of Stevenson, and it is available
for all readers. He was raised by Cummy, his nurse, whose library was
chiefly the Bible, the shorter catechism, and the _Life of Robert Murray
McCheyne_. He said that the fifty-eighth chapter of Isaiah was his special
chapter, because it so repudiated cant and demanded a self-denying
beneficence. He loved Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_; but "the Bible most
stood him in hand." Every great story or essay shows its influence. He was
not critical with it; he did not understand it; he did not interpret it
fairly; but he felt it. His _Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde_ is only his way of
putting into modern speech Paul's old distinction between the two men who
abide in each of us. They told him he ought not to work in Samoa, and he
replied that he could not otherwise be true to the great Book by which he
and all men who meant to do great work must live. Over the shoulder of our
beloved Robert Louis Stevenson you can see the great characters of
Scripture pressing him forward to his best work.

Not so much can be said of Swinburne. There was a strong infusion of acid
in his nature, which no influence entirely destroyed. He is apt to live as
a literary critic and essayist, though he supposed himself chiefly a poet.
His own thought of poetry can be seen in his protest in behalf of
Meredith. When he had been accused of writing on a subject on which he had
no conviction to express ("Modern Love"), Swinburne denied that poets
ought to preach anyway. "There are pulpits enough for all preachers of
prose, and the business of verse writing is hardly to express
convictions." Yet it is impossible to forget Milton and his purpose to
"assert Eternal Providence, and justify the ways of God to men."
Naturally, most poets do preach and preach well. Wordsworth declared he
wanted to be considered a teacher or nothing. Mrs. Browning thought that
poets were the only truth-tellers left to God. But Swinburne could not
help a little preaching at any rate. His "Masque on Queen Bersaba" is an
old miracle play of David and Nathan. His "Christmas Antiphones" are
hardly Christian, though they are abundant in their allusions to
Scripture. The first is a prayer for peace and rest in the coming of the
new day of the birth of Christ. The second is a protest that neither God
nor man has befriended man as he should, and the third is an assurance
that men will do for man even if God will not. Now, that is not Christian,
but the Bible phrases are all through it. So when he writes his poem
bemoaning Poland, he needs must head it "Rizpah." At the same time it must
be said that Swinburne shows less of the influence of the Bible in his
style and in his spirit than any other of our great English writers.

We come back again into the atmosphere of strong Bible influence when we
name Alfred Tennyson. When Byron died, and the word came to his father's
rectory at Somersby, young Alfred Tennyson felt that the sun had fallen
from the heavens. He went out alone in the fields and carved in the
sandstone, as though it were a monument: "Byron is dead." That was in the
early stage of his poetical life. At first Carlyle could not abide
Tennyson. He counted him only an echo of the past, with no sense for the
future; but when he read Tennyson's "The Revenge," he exclaimed, "Eh, he's
got the grip o' it"; and when Richard Monckton Milnes excused himself for
not getting Tennyson a pension by saying his constituents had no use for
poetry anyway, Carlyle said, "Richard Milnes, in the day of judgment when
you are asked why you did not get that pension, you may lay the blame on
your constituents, but it will be you who will be damned!" Dr. Henry van
<DW18> studied Tennyson to best effect at just this point. In his chapter on
"The Bible in Tennyson" are many such sayings as these: "It is safe to say
that there is no other book which has had so great an influence upon the
literature of the world as the Bible. We hear the echoes of its speech
everywhere, and the music of its familiar phrases haunts all the field and
grove of our fine literature. At least one cause of his popularity is that
there is so much Bible in Tennyson. We cannot help seeing that the poet
owes a large debt to the Christian Scriptures, not only for their
formative influence on his mind and for the purely literary material in
the way of illustrations and allusions which they have given him, but also
for the creation of a moral atmosphere, a medium of thought and feeling in
which he can speak freely and with an assurance of sympathy to a very wide
circle of readers."

I need not stop to indicate the great poems in which Tennyson has so often
used Scripture. The mind runs quickly to the little maid in "Guinevere,"
whose song, "Late, Late, so Late," is only a paraphrase of the parable of
the foolish virgins. "In Memoriam" came into the skeptical era of
England, with its new challenge to faith, and stopped the drift of young
men toward materialism. Recall the fine use he makes, in the heart of it,
of the resurrection of Lazarus, and other Biblical scenes. Dr. van <DW18>'s
"four hundred direct references to the Bible" do not exhaust the poems. No
one can get Tennyson's style without the English Bible, and no one can
read Tennyson intelligently without a fairly accurate knowledge of the
Bible.

In this Victorian group the last name is Thackeray's. He is another whose
mother trained him in the English Bible. The title of _Vanity Fair_ is
from _Pilgrim's Progress_, but the motto is from the Scripture; and he
wrote his mother regarding the book: "What I want is to make a set of
people living without God in the world (only that is a cant phrase.)" It
is certain his mother did not count it a cant phrase, for he learned it
from the Scripture. The subtitle of his _Adventures of Philip_ says he is
to show who robbed him, who helped him, and who passed him by. Thackeray
got those expressions from the Bible. Somewhere very early in any of his
works he reveals the influence of his childhood and manhood knowledge of
the English Bible.

All this about the Victorian group is meant to be very familiar to any who
are fresh from the reading of literature. They are great names, and they
have differences as wide as the poles; but they have this in common, that
they have drunk lightly or deeply from the same fountain; they have drawn
from it ideas, allusions, literary style. Each of them has weakened as he
has gotten farther from it, and loyalty to it has strengthened any one of
them.

       *       *       *       *       *

Turn now to the American group of writers. If we except theological
writers with Jonathan Edwards, Horace Bushnell, Henry Ward Beecher, and
their like, and political writers with Jefferson, Webster, and their like,
the list need not be a long one. Only one writer in our narrower sense of
literature must be named in the earlier day--Benjamin Franklin. In the
period before the Civil War must be named Edgar Allan Poe (died 1849) and
Washington Irving (died 1859). The Civil War group is the large one, and
its names are those of the later group as well. Let them be alphabetical,
for convenience: William Cullen Bryant, poet and critic; George William
Curtis, essayist and editor; Emerson, our noblest name in the sphere of
pure essay literature; Hawthorne, the novelist of conscience, as Socrates
was its philosopher; Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose "two chief hatreds were
orthodoxy in religion and heterodoxy in medicine"; James Russell Lowell,
essayist and poet, apt to live by his essays rather than by his poetry;
Longfellow, whose "Psalm of Life" and "Hiawatha" have lived through as
much parody and ridicule as any two bits of literature extant, and have
lived because they are predestined to live; Thoreau, whose _Walden_ may
show, as Lowell said, how much can be done on little capital, but which
has the real literary tang to it; and Whittier, whose poetry is sung the
world around.

That makes only twelve names from Franklin to Whittier. Others could be
included; but they are not so great as these. No one of these could be
taken out of our literature without affecting it and, in some degree at
least, changing the current of it. This is not to forget Bret Harte nor
Samuel L. Clemens. But each is dependent for his survival on a taste for a
certain kind of humor, not delicate like Irving's and Holmes's, but strong
and sudden and a bit sharp. If we should forget the "Luck of Roaring
Camp," "Truthful James," and the "Heathen Chinee," we would also forget
Bret Harte. We are not apt to forget _Tom Sawyer_, nor perhaps _The
Innocents Abroad_, but we are forgetting much else of Mark Twain. Whitman
is not named. His claims are familiar, but in spite of his admirers he
seems so charged with a sensuous egotism that he is not apt to be a
formative influence in literary history. It is still interesting, however,
to remember how frequently he reveals his reading of Scripture.

Fortunately, all these writers are so near, and their work is so familiar,
that details regarding them are not needed. Two or three general words can
be said. In the first place, observe the high moral tone of all these
first-grade writers, and, indeed, of the others who may be spoken of as in
second rank. There is not a meretricious or humiliating book in the whole
collection. There is not one book which has lived in American literature
which has the tone of Fielding's _Tom Jones_. Whether it is that the
Puritan strain continues in us or not, it is true that the American
literary public has not taken happily to stories that would bring a blush
in public reading. Professor Richardson, of Dartmouth, gives some clue to
the reason of that. He says that "since 1870 or 1880 in America there has
been a marked increase of strength of theistic and spiritual belief and
argument among scientific men, students of philosophy, religious
'radicals,' and others." He adds that while much contemporary American
literature and thought is outside the accepted orthodox lines, yet "it is
not hostile to Christianity; to the principles of its Founder it is for
the most part sincerely attached. On the other hand, materialism has
scarcely any hold upon it." Then follows a very notable sentence which is
sustained by the facts: "Not an American book of the first class has ever
been written by an atheist or denier of immortality." That sentence need
not offend an admirer of Walt Whitman, for he "accepts both theism and the
doctrine of the future life." American thought has remained loyal to the
great Trinity, God, Freedom, and Immortality. So it comes about that while
there are a number of these writers who could be put under the ban of the
strongly orthodox in religion, every one of them shows the effect of early
training in religion and in the Scripture.[39]

Another thing to be said is that America has a unique history among great
nations in that it has never been affected by any great religious
influence except that which has issued from the Scriptures. No religion
has ever been influential in America except Christianity. For many years
there have been sporadic and spasmodic efforts to extend the influence of
Buddhism or other Indian cults. They have never been successful, because
the American spirit is practical, and not meditative. We are not an
introspective people. We do not look within ourselves for our religion.
Whatever moral and religious influence our literature shows gets back
first or last to our Scriptures. The point of view of nature that is taken
by our writers like Bryant and Thoreau is that of the Nineteenth Psalm.
Moreover, we have been strongly under the English influence. Irving
insisted that we ought to be, that we were a young nation, that we ought
frankly to follow the leadership of more experienced writers. Longfellow
thought we had gone too far that way, and that our poets, at least, ought
to be more independent, ought to write in the spirit of America and not of
traditional poetry. Whether we ought to have yielded to it or not, it is
true that English influence has told very strongly upon us, and the
writers who have influenced our writers most have been those whom we have
named as being themselves under the Bible influence.

We need not go into detail about these writers, though they are most
attractive. Bryant did for us what Wordsworth did for England. He made
nature seem vocal. "Thanatopsis" is not a Christian poem in the narrow
sense of the word, and yet it could hardly have been written except under
Christian influence. His own genial, beautiful character was itself a
tribute to Christian civilization, and his life, as critic and essayist,
has left an impression which we shall not soon lose. Professor Richardson
thinks that the three problematical characters in American literature are
Emerson, Hawthorne, and Poe. The shrewdest estimate of Poe that has ever
been given us is in Lowell's _Fable for Critics_:

    "There comes Poe with his raven like Barnaby Rudge,
    Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge,
    Who has written some things quite the best of their kind,
    But the heart somehow seems all squeezed out by the mind."

That says it exactly. Poe knew many horrible situations, but he did not
know the way out; and of all our American writers laying claim to place in
the first class Poe shows least influence of the Bible, and apparently
needs it most.

Irving was the first American writer who stood high enough to be seen
across the water. Thackeray's most beautiful essay is on Irving and
Macaulay, who died just one month apart. In it he describes Irving as the
best intermediary between the nations, telling us Americans that the
English are still human, and assuring the English that Americans are
already human. Irving was trained early and thoroughly in the Bible. All
his life he was an old-fashioned Episcopalian with no concern for new
religious ideas and with no rough edges anywhere. Charles Dudley Warner,
speaking of Irving's moral quality, says: "I cannot bring myself to
exclude it from a literary estimate, even in the face of the current
gospel of art for art's sake."[40] Like Scott, he "recognized the abiding
value in literature of integrity, sincerity, purity, charity, faith. These
are beneficences, and Irving's literature, walk around it and measure it
by whatever critical instruments you will, is a beneficent literature."

Then there is Emerson, a son of the manse and once a minister himself. He
was, therefore, perfectly familiar with the English Bible. He did not
accept it in all its religious teaching. Indeed, we have never had a more
marked individualist in our American public life than Emerson. At every
point he was simply himself. There is very little quotation in his
writing, very little visible influence of any one else. He was not a
follower of Carlyle, though he was his friend. If there is any precedent
for the construction of his sentences, and even of his essays, it is to be
found in the Hebrew prophets. As some one puts it, "he uttered sayings."
In many of his essays there is no particular reason why the paragraphs
should run one, two, three, and not three, two, one, or two, one, three,
or in any other order. But Mr. Emerson was just himself. It is yet true
that "his value for the world at large lies in the fact that after all he
is incurably religious." It is true that he could not see any importance
in forms, or in ordinary declarations of faith. "He would fight no battle
for prelacy, nor for the Westminster confession, nor for the Trinity, but
as against atheism, pessimism, and materialism, he was an ally of
Christianity." The influence of the Bible on Emerson is more marked in his
spirit than in anything else. Once in a while, as in that familiar address
at Concord (1873), you run across Scripture phrases: "Shall not they who
receive the largest streams spread abroad the healing waters?" That figure
appears in literature only in the Bible, and there are others like it in
his writings.

As for Longfellow, he is shot through with Scripture. No man who did not
know Scripture in more than a passing way could have written such a
sentence as this: "There are times when the grasshopper is a burden, and
thirsty with the heat of labor the spirit longs for the waters of Shiloah,
that go softly." There are two strikingly beautiful expressions from
Scripture. Take another familiar saying in the same essay when he says the
prospect for poetry is brightening, since but a short time ago not a poet
"moved the wing or opened the mouth or peeped." He did not run across that
in general current writing. He got that directly from the Bible. In his
poems is an amazing amount of reference to the Bible. One would expect
much in the "Courtship of Miles Standish," for that is a story of the
Puritans, and they spoke, naturally, in terms of the Bible; yet, of
course, they could not do it in Longfellow's poem, if Longfellow did not
know the language of the Bible very well. One might not expect to find it
so much in "Evangeline," but it is there from beginning to end. In
"Acadia," the cock crowed

                          "With the self-same
    Voice that in ages of old had startled the penitent Peter."

And,

              "Wild with the winds of September,
    Wrestled the trees of the forest, as Jacob of old with the angel."

Evangeline saw the moon pass

    "Forth from the folds of the cloud, and one star followed her
        footsteps,
    As out of Abraham's tent young Ishmael
    Wandered with Hagar."

There is a great deal of that sort of thing in his writing. He has done
for many what he did for Lowell one day. Discouraged in settling the form
of a new edition of his own poems, Lowell took up a volume of Longfellow
just to see the type, and presently found that he had been reading two
hours. He wrote Longfellow he could understand his popularity, saying:
"You sang me out of all my worries." That is a great thing to do, and
Longfellow learned from the Scripture how to do that in the "Psalm of
Life" and all his other poems.

We need only a word about Lowell himself. He was the son of a minister,
and so knew the Bible from his infancy. He belonged to the Brahman caste
himself, but a good deal of the ruggedness of the Old Testament got into
his writing. It is in "The Vision of Sir Launfal." It is in his plea for
international copyright where the familiar lines occur:

    "In vain we call old notions fudge,
    And bend our conscience to our dealing,
    The Ten Commandments will not budge,
    And stealing will continue stealing."

There is hint of it in his quizzical lines about himself in the _Fable for
Critics_. He says that he is in danger of rattling away

    "Until he is as old as Methusalem,
    At the head of the march to the last New Jerusalem."

Whittier needs no words of ours. His hymns are part of our religious
equipment. "Snow-bound" and all the rest of the beautiful, quiet,
Quaker-like writing of this beloved poet are among our national assets. We
join in his sorrow as he writes the doom of Webster and his fame, and we
do not wonder that he chose for it the Scriptural title "Ichabod."

Whatever is to be said about an individual here or there, it is true that
great American literature shows the influence of the Bible. Like
everything else in America, it has been founded on a religious purpose.
Writers in all lines have been trained in the Bible. If they feel any
religious influence at all, it is the Bible influence.

This has been a long journey from Shakespeare to Whittier, and it leaves
untouched the great field of present-day writers. Let the unstarred names
wait their time. Among them are many who can say in their way what Hall
Caine has said of himself: "I think I know my Bible as few literary men
know it. There is no book in the world like it, and the finest novels ever
written fall far short in interest of any one of the stories it tells.
Whatever strong situations I have in my books are not of my creation, but
are taken from the Bible. _The Deemster_ is a story of the Prodigal Son.
_The Bondman_ is the story of Esau and Jacob. _The Scapegoat_ is the story
of Eli and his sons, but with Samuel as a little girl; and _The Manxman_
is the story of David and Uriah." Take up any of the novels of the day,
even the poorer ones, but notably the better ones, and see how uniformly
they show the Scriptural influence in material, in idea, and in spirit.
What the literature of the future will be no one can say. This much is as
sure as any fact in literary history, that the English Bible is part of
the very fiber of great literature from the day it first appeared in our
tongue to this hour.

FOOTNOTES:

[27] _Thoughts that Breathe._

[28] _Atlantic Monthly_, May, 1900, p. 684.

[29] Chapman, _English Literature in Account with Religion_.

[30] _History of English Literature_, chap. iii.

[31] Wordsworth, _Shakespeare's Knowledge and Use of the Bible_, p. 9.

[32] Strong, _The Theology of the Poets_.

[33] _History of England_, vol. III., p. 220.

[34] Taine, _English Literature_, II., 279.

[35] June 14, 1830.

[36] Morley, _Life of Gladstone_, vol. iii, p. 424.

[37] _Early Victorian Literature_, p. 9.

[38] _English Literature in Account with Religion._

[39] This is fully worked out in Professor Richardson's _American
Literature_, with ample illustration and argument.

[40] _American Men of Letters Series, Washington Irving_, p. 302.




LECTURE V

THE KING JAMES VERSION--ITS INFLUENCE ON ENGLISH AND AMERICAN HISTORY


The King James version of the Bible is only a book. What can a book do in
history? Well, whatever the reason, books have played a large part in the
movements of men, specially of modern men.

They have markedly influenced the opinion of men about the past. It is
commonly said that Hume's _History of England_, defective as it is, has
yet "by its method revolutionized the writing of history," and that is
true. Nearer our own time, Carlyle's _Life of Cromwell_ reversed the
judgment of history on Cromwell, gave all readers of history a new
conception of him and his times and of the movement of which he was the
life. After the Restoration none were so poor as to do Cromwell reverence
until Carlyle's _book_ gave him anew to the world.

There are instances squarely in our own time by which their mighty
influence may be tested. They are of books of almost ephemeral value save
for the student of history. As literature they will be quickly forgotten;
but as _forces_ they must be reckoned with. There is _Uncle Tom's Cabin_.
It would be absurd to say that it brought the American Civil War, or freed
the <DW64>s, or saved the Union. It did none of those great things. Yet it
is not at all absurd to name it among the potent powers in all three. It
is not to our purpose whether it is true or not as a statement of the
whole fact. Doubtless it was not true of the general and common
circumstances of Southern slavery; but everything in it was possible, and
even frequent enough so that it could not be questioned. It pretended no
more. But its influence was simply tremendous. In book form it became
available in 1852, and within three years, 1855, it was common property of
English-speaking people. No other book ever produced so extraordinary an
effect so quickly in the public mind.[41] It held up slavery to judgment.
It crystallized the thoughts of common people. The work of those strenuous
years in the '60's could not have been done without the result of that
book. It made history. Come nearer our own day. We could not be long in
London without feeling the concern of the better people for conditions in
the East End. A new social impulse has seized them. To be sure, it lacks
much yet of success; but more has been done than most people realize. The
new movement, the awakening of that social sense, traces back to the book
of Gen. William Booth, _In Darkest England_ (1890). It has helped to
change the life of a large part of London.

On this side, the new concern for city conditions dates from the book of a
newspaper reporter, Jacob A. Riis, _How the Other Half Lives_. It thrust
the Other Half into such prominence that it has never been possible to
forget it. Marked advance in all American cities, in legislation and life,
goes straight back to it. Name one other book still in the field of social
service, even so unpleasant, so terrible, so obnoxious a book as Upton
Sinclair's _The Jungle_. It started and sustained movements which have
unsettled business and political life ever since it appeared. It made some
conditions vivid, unescapable.

Do not misunderstand the argument. No man can tell what will be said in
the histories a century from now about these lesser books. We can never go
beyond guesses as to the whole cause of any chain of events.[42] As time
passes, incidental elements in the causes gradually sink out of sight and
a few great forces take the whole horizon. Whatever the histories a
century from now say about the relative place of such books as we have
named, it is certain that they have influenced the movements mightily. The
literary histories will say nothing at all about them. They are not great
literature, but they were born of a passion of the times and voiced and
aroused it anew.

When, therefore, it is urged that the English Bible has influenced
history, it is not making an undue claim for it. When it is further urged
that of all books in English literature it has been most influential, it
has most made history, it has most determined great movements, the
argument only claims for it the highest place among books.

And it would not be surprising if it should have such influence. It is the
one great piece of English literature which is universal property. Since
the day it was published it has been kept available for everybody. No
other book has ever had its chance. English-speaking people have always
been essentially religious. They have always had a profound regard for the
terms, the institutions, the purposes of religion. Partly that has been
maintained by the Bible; but the Bible in its turn has been maintained by
it. So it has come about that English-speaking people, though they have
many books, are essentially people of one Book. Wherever they are, the
Bible is. Queen Victoria has it near by when the messenger from the Orient
appears, and lays her hand upon it to say that this is the foundation of
the prosperity of England. But the poor housewife in the cottage, with
only a crust for food, stays her soul with it. The Puritan creeps into
hiding with the Book, while his brother sails away to the new land with
the Book. The settler may have his Shakespeare; he will surely have his
Bible. As the long wagon-train creeps across the plain to seek the Western
shore, there may be no other book in all the train; but the Bible will be
there. Find any settlement of men who speak the English tongue, wherever
they make their home, and the Bible is among them. When did any book have
such a chance to influence men? It is the one undisturbed heritage of all
who speak the English tongue. It binds the daughter and the mother country
together, and gathers into the same bond the scattered remnants of the
English-speaking race the world around. Its language is the one speech
they all understand. Strange it would be if it had not a profound
influence upon history!

Another fact that has helped to give the Bible its great influence is the
power of the preaching it has inspired. The periods of greatest preaching
have always been the periods of freest access to the Bible. No one can
overlook the immense power of the sermons of history. There have been
poor, inept, banal expositors, doubtless; but even they turned men's minds
to the Bible. Reading the Bible makes men thinkers, and so makes preachers
inevitably. Witness the Scotch. James was raised in Scotland and believed
in the power of preaching. At one time he wanted to settle endowments for
the maintenance of preaching under government control. But Archbishop
Whitgift convinced him that much preaching was "an innovation and
dangerous," since it is quite impossible to control a man's mouth once it
is given a public chance. Under Charles I. the sermon was mighty in the
service of the Puritans until it was suppressed or restricted. Then men
became lecturers and expounded the Bible or taught religious truth in
public or private. Rich men engaged private chaplains since public
meetings could not be held. Somehow they taught the Bible still.
Archbishop Laud forbade both. Yet the leaven worked the more for its
restriction. At least one good cook I know says that if you want your
dough to rise and the yeast to work, you must cover it. Laud did not want
it to rise, but he made the mistake of covering it.

There has never been a book which has provoked such incessant preaching
and discussion as has the Bible. The believers in the Koran teach it as it
is, word for word. Believers in the Bible have never stopped with that.
They have always tried to come together and hear it expounded. Such
gatherings and such constant pressure of the Book on groups of hearers
would inevitably give the Bible great influence. When it is remembered
that in America alone there are each week approximately four hundred
thousand gatherings of people which have for their avowed purpose
instruction or inspiration in religion, and that the instruction and
inspiration are professedly and openly drawn from the Bible, that more
than three hundred thousand sermons are preached every week from it and
passages of it read in all the gatherings, it appears that the Bible had
and still has such a chance to influence life as no other book has had.
President Schurman traces a large part of our own stronger American life
to the educative power of our Sundays. But central in the education of
those days is now, and has been from the first of our national history,
the English Bible.

The influence of the Bible comes also from the fact that it makes its
chief appeal to the deeper elements in life. "Human history in its real
character is not an account of kings and of wars; it is the unfolding of
the moral, the political, the artistic, the social, and the spiritual
progress of the human family. The time will yet come when the names of
dynasties and of battles shall not form the titles of its chapters. The
truths revealed in the Bible have been the touchstone which has tried
men's spirits."[43]

Those words go to the heart of the fact. The influence of the English
Bible on English-speaking history for the last three hundred years is only
the influence of its fundamental truths. It has moved with tremendous
impact on the wills of men. It has made the great human ideals clear and
definite; it has made them beautiful and attractive; but that has not been
enough. It has reached also the springs of action. It has given men a
sense of need and also a sense of strength, a sense of outrage and a sense
of power to correct the wrong. There it has differed from most books.
Frederick Robertson said that he read only books with iron in them, and,
as he read, their atoms of iron entered the blood, and it ran more red for
them.

There is iron in this Book, and it has entered the blood of the human
race. Where it has entered most freely, the red has deepened; and nowhere
has it deepened more than in our English-speaking races. The iron of our
blood is from this King James version.

Bismarck explained the victories of the Germans over the French by the
fact that from childhood the Germans had been trained in the sense of
duty, as the French had not been trained, and as soldiers had learned to
feel that nothing could escape the Eye which ever watched their course.
They learned that, Bismarck said, from the religion which they had been
taught. There is no mistaking the power of religion in rousing and
sharpening the sense of duty. Webster spoke for the English-speaking
races, and found his phrases in the Bible, when he said that this sense
"pursues us ever. It is omnipresent like the Deity. If we take to
ourselves the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the
sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us for our happiness or
our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in
the light our obligations are yet with us. We cannot escape from their
power or fly from their presence." It is religion which makes that sense
of duty keen; and, whatever religion has done among English-speaking
races, the English Bible has done, for it has been the text-book and the
final authority of those races in the moving things of their faith.

It would be easiest in making the argument to single out here and there
the striking events in which the Bible has figured and let them stand for
the whole. There are many such events, and they are attractive.

We can imagine ourselves standing on the shore at Dover in 1660, fifty
years after the version was issued, waiting with the crowd to see the
banished King return. The civil war is over, the protectorate under
Cromwell is past. Charles II., thick-lipped, sensuous, "seeming to belong
rather to southern Europe than to Puritan England," is about to land from
France, whence the people, wearied with Puritan excesses, have called him
back. There is a great crowd, but they do not cheer wildly. There is
something serious on hand. They mean to welcome the King; but it is on
condition. Their first act is when the Mayor of Dover places in his hands
a copy of the English Bible, which the King declares he loves above all
things in the world. It proves only a sorry jest; but the English people
think it is meant for truth, and they go to their homes rejoicing. They
rejoiced too soon, for this is that utterly faithless king for whom his
witty courtier proposed an epitaph:

    "Here lies our sovereign lord, the king,
      Whose word no man relies on;
    Who never said a foolish thing,
      And never did a wise one."[44]

As at other times, the King was only talking with no meaning; but the
people did not know him yet. They had made their Bible the great test of
their liberties: will a king stand by that or will he not? If he will not,
let him remember Charles the First! And from that day no English king, no
American leader, has ever successfully restricted English-speaking people
from free access to their great Book. It has become a banner of their
liberties. The child was wiser than he knew when he was asked what lesson
we may learn from Charles I., and replied that we may learn that a man
should not lose his head in times of excitement. Charles lost his head
long before he laid it on the block.

Besides the scene at Dover, we may watch that great emigration of the
Scotch-Irish from Ulster, beginning in 1689, seventy years after the
Puritan exodus and eighty years after the version was issued, which
peopled the backwoods of America with a choice, strong population. They
were only following the right to worship freely, the right to their Bible
without chains on its lids or on the lips of its preachers. They were
making no protest against Romanism nor against Anglicanism in themselves.
They only claimed the right to worship as they would. Under William and
Mary, after James II. had fled to France, toleration became the law in
England; but when Ireland was reconquered by William's generals, the act
of toleration was not extended to it. Baptists, Presbyterians, all except
the small Anglican Church, were put under the ban and forbidden to
worship. But the Bible had made submission impossible, and there came
about that great exodus to the new land which has so blessed it.

There are other signal events which might be observed. But all the while
there would be danger of magnifying the importance of events which seem to
prove the point. The view needs to be a more general one instead. The
period is not long--three hundred years at the most--though it has a
background of all English history. We have already seen how from the first
there have been determined efforts to make the Bible common to the people;
yet, of course, the influence of our version can appear only in these
three hundred years since it was issued. That short period has not only
been interesting almost to the point of excitement in English life, but it
covers virtually all American life. Take, therefore, the broader view of
the influence of the English Bible on history, apart from these striking
events.

It is to be assumed at once that much of its influence is indirect.
Indeed, its chief influence must be through men who prove to be leaders
and through that public sentiment without which leaders are powerless. If
leaders live by it and stand or fall by its teaching, then their work is
its work. If they find a public sentiment issuing from it which gives them
power, a sentiment which crystallizes around them when they appear,
because it is of kindred spirit with themselves, then the power of that
sentiment is the power of the Bible. The influence of _Pilgrim's Progress_
or _The Saint's Rest_ is the influence of Bunyan and Baxter; but back of
them is the Bible. In language, in idea, in spirit, they were only making
the Bible a common Book to their readers. Their value for life and history
is the Bible's value for life and history.

The power of great souls is frequently and easily underestimated.
Scientific study has tended to that by magnifying visible conditions and
by trying to calculate the force of laws which are in plain sight.
Buckle's theory of civilization has influenced our times greatly. It
explains national character as the outcome of natural conditions, and lays
such stress on circumstances as left it possible for Buckle to declare
that history and biography are in different spheres. It is still true,
however, that most history turns on biography. Great souls have been the
chief factors in great movements. Whether the movement could have occurred
without them will never be possible to decide, if it should be disputed.
In a chemical laboratory the essential factors of any phenomenon can be
determined by the process of elimination. All the elements which preceded
it except one can be introduced; if the result is the same as in its
presence, manifestly it is not essential. So the experiment can go on
until the result becomes different, when it is evident that the last
omitted element is an essential one. But no such process is possible in
great historical movements. The only course open to us is to consider
carefully the elements which do appear.

Take three great movements which are easiest to follow in these three
centuries. Whether the spiritual independence of England would have been
secured without the Quakers may be debated; but this fact can hardly be
debated: certainly it was not so secured; whether or not the Quakers could
have been without George Fox, certainly they did not occur without him.
Take the second: whether or not some other movement could have done what
Puritanism did is hardly a question for history; Puritanism actually did
the work for England and America which gave both their strongest
qualities. There is no testing the period to see whether Puritanism could
be left out. There it stands as a powerful factor, and no analysis of the
history can possibly omit it. Or the third: it is not a question for a
historian whether English history could have been the same without
Methodism and whether Methodism could have been at all without the
Wesleys; certainly nothing took its place, nor did any one else stand at
the head of the movement.

Here are these three great movements, not to seek others. All of them have
had tremendous influence in the religious and political history of both
the nations where they have moved most freely. Each of them is a direct
and undisputed result of the influence of the Bible. Much has already been
said of the Puritans in England, and there will be occasion to see what
was their influence in America. But think for a moment of the Quakers.
James Freeman Clark calls them the English mystics; certainly they were
more than that.[45] George Fox had little learning but the Bible; that he
knew well. He first came to himself out in the fields alone with the
Bible. He was not stirred to the origin of the movement nor to his
greatest activity by experiences he had in public places. He came to those
public places profoundly affected by his familiarity with the English
Bible. He came at a time when his protest was needed, a protest against
formalism, against mere outward conformity. A thousand years before,
Mohammedanism had really saved the Christian faith by its protest, violent
and merciless, against its errors, challenging it to purity in faith and
life. Now Fox and the Quakers saved church life by protest against church
life. The Bible was still the law, but not the Bible which you read for
me, but that which you read for you and I for me, each of us guided by an
inner light. The Quaker movement was a distinct protest against church
formalism in the interests of freedom of the Bible.

That Quaker influence was far stronger in America than it ever proved to
be in England. George Fox himself visited the colonies and extended its
influence. Three great effects are easily traceable. The very presence of
the Quakers in the New England colonies, notably in Massachusetts, and the
persecutions which they endured, did more to purify the Puritans than any
other one influence. One is only loyal to the Puritan character and
teaching in declaring that in the manner of the Puritans toward the
Quakers they were wrong; they were wrong because they were untrue to their
own belief, untrue to their own Bibles, and when the more thoughtful among
them found that they were taking the attitude toward the Quakers which
they had resented toward themselves, remembering that the Quakers were
drawing their teaching from the same Bible as themselves, they were
naturally checked. And, while the Quakers in New England suffered greatly,
their suffering proved the purification of the Puritans. It accented and
so it removed the narrowness of Puritan practice. Further, the Quaker
movement gave to American history William Penn and the whole constitution
of Pennsylvania. It was there that a state first lived by the principle
which William Penn pronounced: "Any government is free where the people
are a party to the laws enacted." So it came about that Independence Hall
is on Quaker soil. The Declaration of Independence appeared there, and not
on Puritan soil. It may be there was more freedom of thought in
Pennsylvania. It may be explained on purely geographical ground,
Philadelphia being the most convenient center for the colonies. But it
remains significant that not on Cavalier soil in Virginia, not on Dutch
soil in New York, not on Puritan soil in Boston, but on Quaker soil in
Philadelphia the movement for national independence crystallized around a
general principle that "any government is free where the people are a
party to the laws enacted," but that no government is free whose people
have not a voice. That is not minimizing the power of Puritanism, nor
forgetting Fanueil Hall and the Tea Party. It only accents what should be
familiar: that Puritanism drew into itself more of the fighting element of
Scripture, while the Quaker movement drew into itself more of the uniting,
pacifying element of Scripture. The third effect of the Quaker movement is
John Greenleaf Whittier, with his gentle but never weak demand that
national freedom should not mean independence of other people alone, but
the independence of all people within the nation. So that while the Quaker
spirit helped the colonies to break loose from foreign control and become
a nation, it helped the nation in turn to break loose from internal
shackles. The nation stood free within itself as well as free from others.
Yet the Quaker movement--and this is the argument--is itself the result of
the English Bible, and the Quaker influence is the influence of the
English Bible on history.

There is not need for extended word about the great Wesleyan movement in
the midst of this period, which has so profoundly affected both English
and American history. It has not worked out into such visible political
forms. But any movement that makes for larger spiritual life makes for the
strengthening of the entire life of the nation. The mere figures of the
early Wesleyan movement are almost appalling. Here was a man, John Wesley,
an Oxford scholar, who spent nearly fifty years traveling up and down and
back and forth through England on horseback, covering more than two
hundred and fifty thousand miles, preaching everywhere more than forty
thousand times, writing, translating, editing two hundred works. When
death ended his busy life there were in his newly formed brotherhood one
hundred and thirty-five thousand members, with five hundred and fifty
itinerants who were following his example with incessant preaching and
Bible exposition. It was the old Wiclif-Lollard movement over again. And
here was the other Wesley, Charles, teaching England to sing again,
teaching the old truths of the Bible in rhyme to many who could not read,
so that they became familiar, writing on horseback, in stage-coaches,
everywhere, writing with one passion, to help England back to the Bible
and its truth. Such activity could not leave the nation unmoved; all its
religious life felt it, and its political life from serf to king was
deeply affected by it. It is a common saying that the Wesleyan movement
saved English liberty from European entanglement. Yet the Wesleyan
movement issued from the Bible and led England back to the Bible.

But apart from these wide movements and the great souls who led them,
there is time for thought of one typical character on each side of the sea
who did not so much make a movement as he proved the point around which a
great fluid idea crystallized into strength. Across the sea the character
shall be that man whom Carlyle gave back to us out of obloquy and
misunderstanding, Oliver Cromwell. Choosing him, we pass other names which
crowd into memory, names of men who have served the need of England
well--Wilberforce, John Howard, Shaftesbury, Gladstone--who drew their
strength from this Book. Yet we choose Cromwell now for argument. On this
side it must be that best known, most beloved, most typical of all
Americans, Abraham Lincoln.

An English historian has said that the most influential, the most
unescapable years in English history are those of the Protectorate. That
is a strong saying. They were brief years. There were many factors in
them. Oliver Cromwell was only one, but he was chief of all. He was not
chief in the councils which resulted in the beheading of Charles I. on
that 30th of January, 1649, though he took part in them. Increasingly in
the movements which led to that event and which followed it he was growing
into prominence. After Marston Moor, Prince Rupert named him Ironsides,
and his regiment of picked men, picked for their spirit, went always into
battle singing psalms, "and were never beaten." As he rode out to the
field at Naseby (1645) he knew he faced the flower of the loyalist army,
while with him were only untrained men; yet he smiled, as he said
afterward, in the "assurance that God would, by things that are not, bring
to naught things that are." Then he adds, "God did it." Never did he raise
his flag but in the interests of the liberty of the people, and back of
every movement of his army there was his confidence in the Bible, which
was his mainstay. They offered him the throne; he would not have it. He
dissolved the Parliament which had dragged on until the patience of the
people was exhausted. He called another to serve their need. The evening
before it met he spent in meditation on the One hundred and third Psalm.
The evening before the second Parliament of his Protectorate he brooded on
the Eighty-fifth Psalm, and opened the Parliament next day with an
exposition of it. The man was saturated with Scripture. Yes, the times
were rude. It was an Old Testament age, and in right Old Testament spirit
did Cromwell work. And it seemed that his work failed. There was no one to
succeed him, and soon after his death came the Restoration and the return
of Charles II., of which we have already spoken, in which occurred that
hint of the real sentiment of the English people which a wise man had
better have taken. Yet, recall what actually happened. Misunderstanding
the spirit of the English people, which Cromwell had helped to form, but
which in turn had made Cromwell possible, the servile courtiers of the
false king unearthed the Protector's body, three years buried, hanged it
on a gallows in Tyburn for a day, beheaded it, and threw the trunk into a
pit. His head they mockingly set on a pinnacle of the Parliament Hall,
whence for some weeks it looked over the city which he had served. Then,
during a great storm, it came clattering down, only a poor dried skull,
and disappeared no one knows where. But when you stand opposite the great
Parliament buildings in London to-day, the most beautiful buildings for
their purpose in the world, the buildings where the liberties of the
English express themselves year after year, whose is the one statue that
finds place within the inclosure, near the spot where that poor skull came
rattling down? Not Charles II.--you shall look in vain for him. Not George
Monk, who brought back the King--you shall not find him there. The one
statue which England has cared to plant beside its Parliament buildings is
that of Oliver Cromwell, its Lord Protector. There he stands, warning
kings in the interests of liberty. John Morley makes no ideal of him. He
thinks he rather closed the medieval period than opened the modern period;
but he will not have Cromwell compared to Frederick the Great, who spoke
with a sneer of mankind. Cromwell "belonged to the rarer and nobler type
of governing men, who see the golden side, who count faith, piety, hope
among the counsels of practical wisdom, and who for political power must
ever seek a moral base." That is a rare and noble type of men, whether
they govern or not. But no man of that type governs without red blood in
his veins; and the iron that made this man's blood run red came from the
English Bible.

It is a far cry from Oliver Cromwell to Abraham Lincoln--far in years, far
in deeds, far in methods, but not far in spirit. Great men are kindred,
generations over. We pass from the Old Testament into the New when we pass
from Cromwell to Lincoln; but we still feel the spirit of liberty. From
the days of the Puritans, the Quakers and the Dutch, history had been
preparing for this time. Benjamin Franklin had done his great work for
human liberty; he had summed up his hope for the nation in his memorable
address in 1787, when he stood eighty-one years old, before the convention
assembled to frame a constitution for the new government. He reminded them
that at the beginning of the contest with the British they had had daily
prayers in that room in Philadelphia for the Divine protection, and said:
"I have lived for a long time, and the longer I live the more convincing
proof I see of this truth, that God governs in the affairs of men. And if
a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable
that an empire can rise without His aid? We have been assured, Sir, in the
sacred writings, that 'Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain
that build it.' I firmly believe this, and I also believe that without His
concurring aid we shall proceed in this political building no better than
the builders of Babel. I therefore beg leave to move that, henceforth,
prayers imploring the assistance of Heaven and its blessing on our
deliberation be held in this assembly every morning before we proceed to
business, and that one or more of the clergy of this city be requested to
officiate in that service."

George Washington sounded a familiar note in his farewell address: "Of all
the dispositions and habits which lead to political prosperity, religion
and morality are indispensable supports. A volume could not trace all
their connection with private and public felicity. Let us with caution
indulge the supposition that morality can be maintained without religion.
Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined education on minds of
peculiar structure, reason and experience both forbid us to expect that
national morality can prevail in exclusion of religious principles."
Thomas Jefferson, of whom it is sometimes said that he was indifferent to
religion, had yet done his great work under inspiration, which he himself
acknowledges in his inaugural address, when he speaks of the nation as
"enlightened by a benign religion, professed indeed, and practised in
various forms, yet all of them inculcating honesty, truth, temperance,
gratitude, and the love of man; acknowledging and adoring an overruling
Providence, which by all its dispensation proves that it results in the
happiness of man here and his greater happiness hereafter." Greater than
Jefferson had appeared John Marshall, greatest of our Chief Justices, like
in spirit to that John Marshall Harlan, whose death marked the year which
has just closed, of whom his colleagues said that he went to his rest each
night with one hand on the Bible and the other on the Constitution of the
United States, a description which could almost be transferred to his
great predecessor in that court. Moreover, when Lincoln came, Joseph
Story, the greatest teacher of law which our country had produced, had
only just died from his place on the Supreme Bench. In his Phi Beta Kappa
address at Harvard (1826), in a brilliant and masterful analysis of "The
Characteristics of the Age," he had paid tribute after tribute to the
power of religion and the Bible. He had declared his belief that the
religion of the Bible had "established itself in the hearts of men by all
which genius could bring to illumine or eloquence to grace its sublime
truths." Of the same period with Lincoln was also Webster, who was called
the "concordance of the House." Many of his stately periods and great
ideas came from the Bible. Indeed, there is no oratory of our history,
which has survived the waste of the years, which does not feel and show
the power of the Scriptures. The English Bible has given our finest
eloquence its ideas, its ideals, its illustrations, its phrases.

The line is unbroken. And it leads to this tall figure, crowned with a
noble head, his face the saddest in American history, who knew Gethsemane
in all its paths. The heart of the American people has always been touched
by his early years of abject poverty. But there were compensations. He had
few books, and they entered his blood and fiber. In his earliest formative
years there were six books which he read and re-read. Nicolay and Hay name
the Bible first in the list, with _Pilgrim's Progress_ as the fourth. Mr.
Morse calls it a small library, but nourishing, and says that Lincoln
absorbed into his own nature all the strong juice of the books.[46] How
much he drew from the pages of the Holy Book let any reader of his
speeches say. Quotation, reference, illustration crowd each other. The
phrases are familiar. The man is full of the Book. And what the man does
is part of the work of the Book.

One of his biographers says that there is nothing in the life or work of
Lincoln which cannot be explained without reference to any supernatural
influence or power. That depends on what is meant by supernatural. There
were no miracles, no astounding visions nor experiences. But there ran
into Lincoln's life from his young manhood onward this steady and strong
current of ideas and ideals from the Bible. In his second inaugural
address he worded the thought that was the deepest horror of the Civil
War--that on both sides of the strife men were reading the same Bible,
praying to the same God, and invoking His aid against each other! In that
very brief inaugural Mr. Lincoln quotes in full three Bible verses, and
makes reference to two others, and the whole address lasted barely four
minutes. There could be no mistaking the solemn importance of the fact to
which he referred in the inaugural, the presence on the other side of men
who held their Bibles high in regard. "Stonewall" Jackson was devout
beyond most men. The two books always at his hand were his Bible and the
_Manual of the Rules of War_. Robert E. Lee was a cultured, Christian
gentleman, as were many others with him, while throughout the South were
multitudes who loved and reverenced the Bible as fully as could any in the
North. As we look back over half a century, this comes out plainly: that
so far as the American civil war was a strife about union pure and simple,
having one nation or two here in our part of the continent, it was matter
of judgment, not of religion. There grew around that question certain
others of national honor and obligation, which were not so clear then as
now. But men on opposite sides of the question might read the same Bible
without finding authoritative word about it. In so far, however, as the
war had at its heart the matter of human slavery, it was possible for men
to differ only when one side read the letter of the Bible while the other
read its manifest spirit. Written in times when slavery was counted matter
of course, its letter dealt with slavery as a fact. It could be read as
though it approved slavery. But long before this day men had found its
true spirit. England had abolished slavery (1808) under the insistence
that it was foreign to all right understanding of God's Word. Lincoln knew
its letter well; he cared for its spirit more, and he found his strength
not in the familiar saying that God was on his side, but in the more
forceful one that he believed himself to be on God's side. So he became a
point around which the great fluid idea crystallized into strength--a
point made and sustained by the influence of the Bible, which he knew only
in the King James version.

       *       *       *       *       *

We have spoken of some wide movements and of men around whom they
crystallized, finding in them the influence of the Bible. It will be well
to note two outstanding traits of the Bible which in English or any other
tongue would inevitably tend to strong and favorable influence on the
history of men. Those two traits are, first, its essential democracy, and,
secondly, its persistent moral appeal.

Here must be recalled that century before the King James version, when by
slow filtration the fundamental ideas of the Bible were entering English
life. Surely it is beyond words that the Bible made Puritanism, though it
was in strong swing when James came to the throne. Now John Richard Green
is well within the fact when he says that "Puritanism may fairly claim to
be the first political system which recognized the grandeur of the people
as a whole."[47] It was the magnifying of the people as a whole over
against some people as having peculiar rights which marked Puritanism, and
which is democracy. Shakespeare knew nothing of it, and had no influence
on the movement for larger democracy. After we have said our strong word
of Shakespeare's powerful influence upon literature it yet must be said
that it is difficult to lay finger on one single historical movement
except the literary one which Shakespeare even remotely influenced. The
Bible, meanwhile, was absolutely creating this movement. Under its
influence "the meanest peasant felt himself ennobled as the child of God,
the proudest noble recognized a spiritual equality with the meanest
saint." That was the inevitable result of a fresh reading of the Bible in
every home. It assured each man that he is a son of God, equal in that
sonship with all other men. It assured him no man has right to lord it
over others, as though his relation to God were peculiar. The Bible
constantly impresses men that this relation to God is the essential one.
Everything else is incidental. Granted now a people freshly under the
influence of that teaching, you have a large explanation of the movement
which followed the issuance of this version.

James opened his first parliament (1604) with a speech claiming divine
right, a doctrine which had really been raised to meet the claim of the
right of the pope to depose kings. James argued that the state of monarchy
is the supremest thing on earth, for kings are not only God's lieutenants
on earth and set upon God's throne, but even by God Himself are called
gods. (He never found that in the Genevan version or its notes!) As to
dispute what God may do is blasphemy, so it is sedition in subjects to
dispute what the king may do in the height of his power. "I will not be
content that my power be disputed on." The House of Commons sat by his
grace and not of any right.

Set that idea of James over against the idea which the Bible was
constantly developing in the mind of the people, and you see why Trevelyan
says that the Bible brought in democracy, and why he thinks, as we have
already seen, that the greatest contribution England has made to
government is its treatment of the Stuarts, when it transferred
sovereignty from the king to Parliament. Among the men who listened to
that kind of teaching were Eliot, Hampden, Pym, all Puritans under the
spell of the Bible. But the strife grew larger than a merely Puritan one.
The people themselves were strongly feeling their rights. "To the devout
Englishman, much as he might love his prayer-book and hate the
dissenters, the core of religion was the life of family prayer and Bible
study, which the Puritans had for a hundred years struggled not in vain to
make the custom of the land." It was this spirit which James met.

We have already thought sufficiently of the events which actually
followed. The final rupture of Charles I. with parliamentary institutions
was due to the religious situation. There were many Bible-reading
families, learning their own rights, while kings and favorites were
plotting war. Laud and the bishops forbade non-conforming gatherings, but
they could not prevent a man's gathering his household about him while he
read the great stories of the Bible, in which no king ruled when he had
ceased to advance his kingdom, in which each man was shut up to God in the
most vital things of his life. The discussion of the time grew keen about
predestination and free-will. One meant that only God had power; the other
meant that men, and if men, then specially kings, might control other men
if only they could. Not fully, but vaguely, the crowd understood. Very
fully, and not vaguely, the leaders understood. Predestination and
Parliament became a cry. That is, control lifted out of the hands of the
free-will of some monarch into the hands of a sovereign God to whom every
man had the same access that any other man had. Laud decreed that all such
discussion should cease. He revived an old decree that no book could be
printed without consent of an archbishop or the Bishop of London. So the
books became secret and more virulent each year. The civil war (1642-46)
between Charles and Parliament was a war of ideas. It is sometimes called
a war of religion, not quite fairly. It was due to the religious
situation, but actually it was for the liberties of the people against the
power of the king. And that question rooted far down in another regarding
the rights of men to be free in their religious life. Charles struck his
coin at Oxford with the Latin inscription: "The Protestant religion; the
laws of England; the liberties of Parliament." But he struck it too late.
He had been trifling with the freedom of the people, and they had learned
from their fireside Bibles and from their pulpits that no man may command
another in his relation to God. It was long after that Burns described
"The Cottar's Saturday Night"; but he was only describing a condition
which was already in vogue, and which was having tremendous influence in
England as well as in Scotland:

    "The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face,
      They, round the ingle, form a circle wide;
    The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace,
      The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride:
    His bonnet rev'rently is laid aside,
      His lyart haffets wearing thin an' bare;
    Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,
      He wales a portion with judicious care,
    And 'Let us worship God!' he says, with solemn air."

Under such guidance as this the people of England, Puritans and others,
relaxed the power of the Stuarts and became a democracy. For democracy is
not a form of government. It can exist under monarchy, provided the
monarchy is a convenience of the will of the people, as it is in England.
It can exist under institutions like our own, provided they also are held
as a convenience of the people. This was no rebellion against some form of
monarchy. It was simply a claim of every man to have his rights before
God. Under the Parliament of eighteen years duration, the Independents,
Presbyterians, and all other non-conforming bodies suffered as heavily as
under James and Charles, yet they did not flee the land. Their battle was
really won. They believed the time would come when they as part of "the
people" who now governed should assert themselves. If they were
persecuted, it was under a government where yet they might hope for their
rights. Fleeing from England in 1620 was heroism; fleeing in 1640 would
have been cowardly. It is impossible to calculate what was the revelation
to the readers of the English Bible of their rights.

Let Trevelyan tell the story: "While other literary movements, however
noble in quality, affect only a few, the study of the Bible was becoming
the national education. Recommended by the king, translated by the
Bishops, yet in chief request with the Puritans, without the rivalry of
books and newspapers, the Bible told to the unscholarly the story of
another age and race, not in bald generalization and doctrinal harangue,
but with such wealth of simple narrative and lyrical force that each man
recognized his own dim strivings after a new spirit, written clear in
words two thousand years old. A deep and splendid effect was wrought by
the monopoly of this Book as the sole reading of common households, in an
age when men's minds were instinct with natural poetry and open to receive
the light of imagination. A new religion arose, of which the mythus was
the Bible stories and the pervading spirit the direct relations of man
with God, exemplified in the human life. And, while imagination was
kindled, the intellect was freed by this private study of the Bible. For
its private study involved its private interpretation. Each reader, even
if a Churchman, became in some sort a church to himself. Hence the hundred
sects and thousand doctrines that astonished foreigners and opened
England's strange path to intellectual liberty. The Bible cultivated here,
more than in any other land, the growth of intellectual thought and
practice."[48]

All that has seemed to refer only to England, but the same essential
democracy of the Bible came to America and founded the new nation. It was
a handful of Puritans turned Pilgrims who set out in the Mayflower to give
their Bible ideas free field. In a dozen years (1628-40), under Laud's
persecution, twenty thousand Englishmen fled to join those Pilgrims. And
how much turned on that! Suppose it had not happened. Then the French of
the North and the cavaliers of Virginia, with the Spanish of the South,
would have had only the Dutch between them. And of the four, only the
Dutch had free access to the Bible. The new land would not have been
English. It is an English writer who says that North America is now
preparing the future of the world, and English speech is the mold in which
the folk of all the world are being poured for their final shaping.[49]
It is the democracy of the Bible which is the fundamental democracy of
America, in which every man has it accented to him that he is so much a
child of God that his rights are inalienable. They cover life and liberty
and the pursuit of happiness. And though we have held that principle of
democracy inconsistently at times, and have paid a terrible price for our
inconsistency in the past, and may pay it in the future again, it is still
true that the fundamental democracy of our American life is only that
essential democracy of the Bible, where every man is made the equal of his
fellow by being lifted into the same relation with Almighty God.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Bible makes its moral appeal on the same basis. If a man is a child of
God, then he is shut up to duties which cannot be avoided. Some one else
may tell a man his duty in a true monarchy. In a democracy each man stands
alone at the most solemn point of his duty. There is no safe democracy
where men refuse to stand alone there. In Jefferson's great speech,
replying to the forebodings of Patrick Henry, he insisted that if men were
not competent to govern themselves they were not competent to govern
other people. The first duty of any man is to take his independent place
before God. Democracy is the social privilege that grows out of the
meeting of these personal obligations.

Several facts strengthen this persistent moral appeal. For one thing, the
Book is absolutely fair to humanity. It leaves out no line or wrinkle; but
it adds none. The men with whom it deals are typical men. The facts it
presents are typical facts. There are books which flatter men, make them
out all good, prattle on about the essential goodness of humanity, while
men who know themselves (and these are the only ones who do things) know
that the story is not true. On the other hand, there are books which are
depressing. Their pigments are all black. They move from the dignity of
Schopenhauer's pessimism to the bedlam of Nietzsche's contempt for life
and goodness. But here, also, the sane common sense of humanity comes to
the rescue. The picture is not true if it is all white or all black. The
Bible is absolutely fair to humanity. It moves within the circle of man's
experience; and, while it deals with men, it results in a treatment of
man.

That is how it comes about that the Bible inspires men, and puts them at
their best. No moral appeal can be successful if it fails to reach the
better part of a man, and lays hold on him there. Just what it did for the
English people. "No greater moral change ever passed over a nation than
passed over England during the years that parted the middle of the reign
of Elizabeth from the meeting of the Long Parliament. England became the
people of a Book, and that Book was the Bible."[50]

Add to that personal appeal and that absolute fairness to humanity the
constant challenge of the Bible to the nobler elements of humanity. It
never trifles. It is in deadly earnest. And it makes earnest men. Probably
we cannot illustrate that earnestness more clearly than by a study of one
element in Puritan history, which is confused in many minds. It is the
matter of the three great antagonisms of Puritanism in England and
America. They can never be understood by moral triflers. They may not be
approved by all the morally serious, but they will be understood by them.
What are those three marked antagonisms? The antagonism to the stage, to
popular frivolity, and to the pleasure of Sabbath.

1. The early English stage had the approval of virtually all the people.
There were few voices raised against the dramas of Shakespeare. But the
cleavage between the Puritans and the stage grew greater as the years went
on. There were riotous excesses. The later comedy after Shakespeare was
incredibly gross. The tragedies were shallow, they turned not on grave
scenes of conscience, but on common and cheap intrigues of incest and
murder. In the mean time, "the hatred of the Puritans for the stage was
only the honest hatred of God-fearing men against the foulest depravity
presented in poetic and dramatic forms." The Bible was laying hold on the
imagination of the people, making them serious, thoughtful, preparing them
for the struggle for liberty which was soon to come. The plays of the time
seemed too trifling or else too foul. The Puritans and the English people
of the day were willing to be amused, if the stage would amuse them. They
were willing to be taught, if the stage would teach them. But they were
not willing to be amused by vice and foulness, and they were not willing
to be taught by lecherous actors who parroted beautiful sentiments of
virtue on the stage and lived filthy lives of incest and shame off the
stage. Life had to be whole to the Puritan, as indeed it has to be to
other thoughtful men. And the Bible taught him that. His concern was for
the higher elements of life; his appeal was to the worthier values in
men. The concern of the stage of his day was for the more volatile
elements in men. The test of a successful play was whether the crowds, any
crowds, came to it. And as always happens when a man wants to catch the
interest of a crowd, the stage catered to its lowest interests. You can
hardly read the story of the times without feeling that the Puritan made
no mistake in his day. He could not have been the thoughtful man who would
stand strong in the struggle for liberty on that side of the sea and the
struggle for life on this side of the sea without opposing trifling and
vice.

2. The antagonism of the early Puritan to popular frivolity needs to have
the times around it to be understood. No great movement carries everybody
with it, and while it is still struggling the majority will be on the
opposing side. While the real leadership of England was passing into the
stronger and more serious hands the artificial excesses of life grew
strong on the people. "Fortunes were being sunk and estates mortgaged in
order that men should wear jewels and dress in  silks."[51] In the
pressure of grave national needs men persisted in frivolity. The two
reigning vices were drunkenness and swearing. In their cups men were
guilty of the grossest indecencies. Even their otherwise harmless sports
were endangered. The popular notion of the May-pole dances misses the real
point of the Puritan opposition to it in Old and New England. It was not
an innocent, jovial out-door event. Once it may have been that. Very often
it was only part of a day which brought immorality and vice in its train.
It was part of a rural paganism. Some of the customs involved such grave
perils, with their seclusion of young people from early dawn in the
forests, as to make it impossible to approve it. Over against all these
things the Puritans set themselves. Sometimes they carried this solemnity
to an absurd length, justifying it by Scripture verses misapplied. Against
the affected elegancies of speech they set the plain yea, yea and nay, nay
of Scripture. In their clothing, their homes, their churches, they, and in
even more marked degree, the Quakers, registered their solemn protest
against the frivolity of the times. If they went too far, it is certain
their protest was needed. Macaulay's epigram is familiar, that the Puritan
"hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it
gave pleasure to the spectators." In so far as that is true, it is to the
credit of the Puritan; for the bear can stand the pain of being baited
far better than human nature can stand the coarsening effects of baiting
him, and it is nobler to oppose such sport on human grounds than on animal
grounds. But, of course, the epigram is Macaulay's, and must be read with
qualification. The fact is, and he says it often enough without epigrams,
that the times had become trifling except as this grave, thoughtful group
influenced them.

3. The attitude of the Puritans toward the Sabbath came from their serious
thought of the Bible. Puritanism gave England the Sabbath again and
planted it in America as an institution. Of course, these men learned all
that they knew of it from the Bible. From that day, in spite of much
change in thought of it, English-speaking people have never been wilful
abusers of the Sabbath. But the condition in that day was very different.
Most of the games were on the day set apart as the Sabbath. There were
bull-baiting, bear-baiting, and football on Sunday. Calvin himself, though
not in England, bowled on Sunday, and poor Knox attended festivities then,
saying grimly that what little is right on week-days is not wrong on
Sundays. After the service on Sunday morning the people thronged to the
village green, where ale flowed freely and games were played until the
evening dance was called. It was a work-day. Elizabeth issued a special
injunction that people work after service on Sundays and holidays if they
wished to do so. Employers were sustained in their demand for Sunday work.

There are always people in every time who count that the ideal Sabbath.
The Puritans found it when they appeared. The English Reformation found it
when it came. And the Bible found it when at last it came out of obscurity
and laid hold on national conditions. Whatever is to be said of other
races, every period of English-speaking history assures us that our moral
power increases or weakens with the rise or fall of Sabbath reverence. The
Puritans saw that. They saw, as many other thoughtful people saw, that the
steady, repeated observance of the Sabbath gave certain national
influences a chance to work; reminded the nation of certain great
underlying and undying principles; in short, brought God into human
thought. The Sunday of pleasure or work could never accomplish that. Both
as religionists and as patriots, as lovers of God and lovers of men, they
opposed the pleasure-Sunday and held for the Sabbath.

But that comes around again to the saying that the persistent moral appeal
of the Bible gives it inevitable influence on history. It centers thought
on moral issues. It challenges men to moral combats.

Such a force persistently working in men's minds is irresistible. It
cannot be opposed; it can only fail by being neglected. And this is the
force which has been steadily at work everywhere in English-speaking
history since the King James version came to be.

FOOTNOTES:

[41] Rhodes. _History of the United States_, vol. i, pp. 185-303.

[42] MacPhail, _Essays on Puritanism_, p. 278.

[43] H. B. Smith, _Faith and Philosophy_, p. 54.

[44] White, in his _History of England_, says that Charles replied that
the explanation was easy: His discourses were his own, his actions were
his ministry's!

[45] David Gregg, _The Quakers in America_.

[46] _American Statesman Series, Abraham Lincoln_, i, 12, 13.

[47] _Short History of the English People_, chap. vii, sec. vii.

[48] _England under the Stuarts._

[49] Trevelyan, _England under the Stuarts_, p. 174.

[50] Green, _Short History of the English People_.

[51] Trevelyan, _England under the Stuarts_, p. 66.




LECTURE VI

THE BIBLE IN THE LIFE OF TO-DAY


This lecture must differ at two points from those which have preceded it.
In the first place, the other lectures have dealt entirely with facts.
This must deal also with judgments. In the earlier lectures we have
avoided any consideration of what ought to have been and have centered our
interest on what actually did occur. We especially avoided any argument
based on a theory of the literary characteristics or literary influence of
the Bible, but sought first to find the facts and then to discover what
explained them. It might be very difficult to determine what is the actual
place of the Bible in the life of to-day. Perhaps it would be impossible
to give a broad, fair judgment. It is quite certain that the people of
James's day did not realize the place it was taking. It is equally certain
that many of those whom it most influenced were entirely unconscious of
the fact. It is only when we look back upon the scene that we discover
the influence that was moving them. But, while it is difficult to say what
the place of the Bible actually is in our own times, the place it ought to
have is easier to point out. That will involve a study of the conditions
of our times, which suggest the need for its influence. While we must
consider the facts, therefore, we will be compelled to pass some judgments
also, and therein this lecture must differ from the others.

The second fact of difference is that while the earlier lectures have
dealt with the King James version, this must deal rather with the Bible.
For the King James version is not the Bible. There are many versions;
there is but one Bible. Whatever the translators put into the various
tongues, the Bible itself remains the same. There are values in the new
versions; but they are simply the old value of the Bible itself. It is a
familiar maxim that the newest version is the oldest Bible. We are not
making the Bible up to date when we make a new version; we are only
getting back to its date. A revision in our day is the effort to take out
of the original writings what men of King James's day may have put in, and
give them so much the better chance. There is no revised Bible; there is
only a revised version. Readers sometimes feel disturbed at what they
consider the changes made in the Bible. The fact is, the revision which
deserves the name is lessening the changes in the Bible; it is giving us
the Bible as it actually was and taking from us elements which were not
part of it. One can sympathize with the eloquent Dr. Storrs, who declared,
in an address in 1879, that he was against any new version because of the
history of the King James version, describing it as a great oak with roots
running deep and branches spreading wide. He declared we were not ready to
give it up for any modern tulip-tree. There is something in that, though
such figures are not always good argument. Yet the value to any book of a
worthy translation is beyond calculation. The outstanding literary
illustration of that fact is familiar. The _Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam_ lay
in Persian literature and in different English translations long before
Fitzgerald made it a household classic for literary people. The translator
made the book for us in a more marked way than the original writer did. In
somewhat the same way the King James version gave to the English-speaking
people the Bible; and no other version has taken its place.

Yet that was not a mistaken move nearly forty years ago, when the revision
of the King James version was proposed and undertaken. Thirty years ago
(1881) it was completed in what we ordinarily call the Revised Version,
and ten years ago (1901) the American form of that Revised Version
appeared. Few things could more definitely prove the accepted place of the
King James version than the fact that we seem to hear less to-day of the
Revised Version than we used to hear, and that, while the American Revised
Version is incomparably the best in existence in its reproduction of the
original, even it makes way slowly. In less than forty years the King
James version crowded all its competitors off the field. The presence of
the Revised Version of 1881 has not appreciably affected the sales or the
demand for the King James version. In the minds of most people the English
and the American revisions stand as admirable commentaries on the King
James version. If one wishes to know wherein the King James version failed
of representing the original, he will learn it better from those versions
than from any number of commentaries; but the number of those to whom one
or other of the versions has supplanted the King James version is not so
large as might have been expected.

There were several reasons for a new English version of the Bible. It was,
of course, no indignity to the King James version. Those translators
frankly said that they had no hope to make a final version of the
Scriptures. It would be very strange if in three hundred years language
should not have grown by reason of the necessities of the race that used
it, so that at some points a book might be outgrown. In another lecture it
has been intimated that the English Bible, by reason of its constant use,
has tended to fix and confirm the English language. But no one book, nor
any set of books, could confine a living tongue. Some of the reasons for a
new version which give value to these two revisions may be mentioned.

1. Though the King James version was made just after the literary
renaissance, the classical learning of to-day is far in advance of that
day. The King James version is occasionally defective in its use of tenses
and verbs in the Greek and also in the Hebrew. We have Greek and Hebrew
scholars who are able more exactly to reproduce in English the meaning of
the original. It would be strange if that were not so.

2. Then there have been new and important discoveries of Biblical
literature which date earlier in Christian history than any our fathers
knew three hundred years ago. In some instances those earlier discoveries
have shown that a phrase here or there has been wrongly introduced into
the text. There has been no marked instance where a phrase was added by
the revisers; that is, a phrase dropped out of the original and now
replaced. One illustration of the omission of a phrase will be enough. In
the fifth chapter of I John the seventh verse reads: "For there are three
that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Word, and the Holy Ghost, and
these three are one." In the revised versions it is omitted, because it
seems quite certain that it was not in the original writing. It does not
at all alter the meaning of Scripture. While it appears in most of the
best manuscripts which were available for the King James translators,
earlier manuscripts found since that time have shown that it was formerly
written at the side as a gloss, and was by some transcriber set over in
the text itself. The process of making the early manuscripts shows how
easily that could have occurred. Let us suppose that two or three
manuscripts were being made at once by different copyists. One was set to
read the original; as he read, the others wrote. It would be easy to
suppose that he might read this marginal reference as a suitable
commentary on the text, and that one or more of the writers could have
written it in the text. It could easily happen also that a copyist, even
seeing where it stood, might suppose it had been omitted by the earlier
copyist, and that he had completed his work by putting it on the margin.
So the next copyist would put it into his own text. Once in a manuscript,
it would readily become part of the accepted form. Discoveries that bring
that sort of thing to light are of value in giving us an accurate version
of the original Bible.

3. Then there are in our King James version a few archaic and obsolete
phrases. We have already spoken of them. Most of them have been avoided in
the revised versions. The neuter possessive pronoun, for example, has been
put in. Animal names have been clarified, obsolete expressions have been
replaced by more familiar ones, and so on.

4. Then there were certain inaccuracies in the King James version. The
fact is familiar that they transliterated certain words which they could
not well translate. In the revised versions that has been carried farther
still. The words which they translated "hell" have been put back into
their Hebrew and Greek equivalents, and appear as Sheol and Hades. Another
instance is that of an Old Testament word, Asherah, which was translated
always "grove," and was used to describe the object of worship of the
early enemies of Israel. The translation does not quite represent the
fact, and the revisers have therefore replaced the old Hebrew word
Asherah. The transliterations of the King James version have not been
changed into translations. Instead, the number of transliterations has
been increased in the interest of accuracy. At one point one might incline
to be adversely critical of the American revisers. They have
transliterated the Hebrew word Jehovah; so they have taken sides in a
controversy where scholars have room to differ. The version would have
gained in strength if it had retained the dignified and noble word "Lord,"
which comes as near representing the idea of the Hebrew word for God as
any word we could find. It must be added that the English of neither of
our new versions has the rhythm and movement of the old version. That is
partly because we are so accustomed to the old expressions and new ones
strike the ear unpleasantly. In any case, the versions differ plainly in
their English. It seems most unlikely that either of these versions shall
ever have the literary influence of the King James, though any man who
will prophesy about that affects a wisdom which he has not.

These, then, are the two differences between this lecture and the
preceding ones, that in this lecture we shall deal with judgments as well
as facts, and that we shall deal with the Bible of to-day rather than the
King James version.

Passing to the heart of the subject, the question appears at once whether
the Bible has or can have to-day the influence or the place which it seems
to have had in the past. Two things force that question: Has not the
critical study of the Bible itself robbed it of its place of authority,
and have not the changes of our times destroyed its possibilities of
influence? That is, on the one hand, has not the Bible been changed? On
the other hand, has it not come into such new conditions that it cannot do
its old work?

It is a natural but a most mistaken idea that the critical study of the
Bible is a new thing. From long before the childhood of any of us there
has been sharp controversy about the Bible. It is a controversy-provoking
Book. It cannot accept blind faith. It always has made men think, and it
makes them think in the line of their own times. The days when no
questions were raised about the Bible were the days when men had no access
to it.

There are some who take all the Bible for granted. They know that there is
indifference to it among friends and in their social circle; but how real
the dispute about the Bible is no one realizes until he comes where new
ideas, say ideas of socialism, are in the air. There, with the breaking of
other chains, is a mighty effort to break this bond also. In such circles
the Bible is little read. It is discussed, and time-worn objections are
bandied about, always growing as they pass. In these circles also every
supposedly adverse result of critical study is welcomed and remembered. If
it is said that there are unexplained contradictions in the Bible, that
fact is remembered. But if it is said further that those contradictions
bid fair to yield to further critical study, or to a wiser understanding
of the situations in which they are involved, that fact is overlooked. The
tendency in these circles is to keep alive rather the adverse phases of
critical study than its favorable phases. Some of those who speak most
fiercely about the study of the Bible, by what is known as higher
criticism, are least intelligent as to what higher criticism actually
means. Believers regret it, and unbelievers rejoice in it. As a matter of
fact, in developing any strong feeling about higher criticism one only
falls a prey to words; he mistakes the meaning of both the words involved.

Criticism does not mean finding fault with the Bible.[52] It is almost an
argument for total depravity that we have made the word gain an adverse
meaning, so that if the average man were told that he had been
"criticized" by another he would suppose that something had been said
against him. Of course, intelligent people know that that is not
necessarily involved. When Kant wrote _The Critique of Pure Reason_ he was
not finding fault with pure reason. He was only making careful analytical
study of it. Now, critical study of the Bible is only careful study of it.
It finds vastly more new beauties than unseen defects. In the same way the
adjective "higher" comes in for misunderstanding. It does not mean
superior; it means more difficult. Lower criticism is the study of the
text itself. What word ought to be here, and exactly what does that word
mean? What is the comparative value of this manuscript over against that
one? If this manuscript has a certain word and that other has a slightly
different one, which word ought to be used?

Take one illustration from the Old Testament and one from the New to show
what lower or textual criticism does. In the ninth chapter of Isaiah the
third verse reads: "Thou hast multiplied the nation and _not_ increased
the joy." That word "not" is troublesome. It disagrees with the rest of
the passage. Now it happens that there are two Hebrew words pronounced
"lo," just alike in sound, but spelled differently. One means "not," the
other means "to him" or "his." Put the second word in, and the sentence
reads: "Thou hast multiplied the nation and increased its joy." That fits
the context exactly. Lower criticism declares that it is therefore the
probable reading, and corrects the text in that way.

The other illustration is from the Epistle of James, where in the fourth
chapter the second verse reads: "Ye lust, and have not; ye kill, and
desire to have, and cannot obtain; ye fight and war, yet ye have not,
because ye ask not." Now there is no commentator nor thoughtful reader who
is not arrested by that word "kill." It does not seem to belong there. It
is far more violent than anything else in the whole text, and it is
difficult to understand in what sense the persons to whom James was
writing could be said to kill. Yet there is no Greek manuscript which does
not have that word. Well, it is in the field of lower criticism to observe
that there is a Greek word which sounds very much like this word "kill,"
which means to envy; that would fit exactly into the whole text here. All
that lower criticism can do is to point out such a probability.

When this form of criticism has done its part, and careful study has
yielded a text which holds together and which represents the very best
which scholarship can find for the original, there is still a field more
difficult than that, higher in the sense that it demands a larger and
broader view of the whole subject. Here one studies the meaning of the
whole, the ideas in it, seeks to find how the revelation of God has
progressed according to the capacities of men to receive it. Higher
criticism is the careful study of the historical and original meanings of
Scripture, the effort to determine dates and times and, so far as may be,
the author of each writing, analyzing its ideas, the general Greek or
Hebrew style, the relation of part to part. That is not a thing to be
afraid of. It is a method of study used in every realm. It is true that
some of the men who have followed that method have made others afraid of
it, because they were afraid of these men themselves. It is possible to
claim far too much for such study. But if the result of higher criticism
should be to show that the latter half of the prophecy of Isaiah is much
later than the earlier half, that is not a destruction of the Word of God.
It is not an irreverent result of study. If the result of higher criticism
is to show that by reason of its content, and the lessons which it
especially urges, the Epistle to the Hebrews was not written by the
Apostle Paul, as it does not at any point claim to have been, why, that is
not irreverent, that is not destructive. There is a destructive form of
higher criticism; against that there is reason to set up bulwarks. But
there is a constructive form of it also. Scholarly opinion will tell any
one who asks that criticism has not affected the fundamental values of the
Bible. In the studies which have just now been made we have not instanced
anything in the Bible that is subject to change. No matter what the result
of critical study may be, the fundamental democracy of the Scripture
remains. It continues to make its persistent moral appeal on any terms.
Both those great facts continue. Other great facts abide with them. And on
their account it is to our interest to know as much as we can learn about
it. The Bible has not been lessened in its value, has not been weakened in
itself, by anything that has taken place in critical study. On the other
hand, the net result of such studies as archaeology has been the
confirmation of much that was once disputed. Sir William Ramsay is the
authority for saying that the spade of the excavator is to-day digging the
grave of many enemies of the Bible.

Take the second question, whether these times have not in them elements
that weaken the hold of the Bible. There again we must distinguish between
facts and judgments. There are certain things in these times which relax
the hold of any authoritative book. There is a general relaxing of the
sense of authority. It does not come alone from the intellectual
awakening, because so far as that awakening is concerned, it has affected
quite as much men who continue loyal to the authority of the Bible as
others. No, this relaxing of the sense of authority is the result of the
first feeling of democracy which does not know law. Democracy ought to
mean that men are left independent of the control of other individuals
because they realize and wish to obey the control of God or of the whole
equally with their fellows. When, instead, one feels independent of
others, and adds to that no sense of a higher control which he must be
free to obey, the result is not democracy, but individualism. Democracy
involves control; individualism does not. A vast number of people in
passing from any sense of the right of another individual to control them
have also passed out of the sense of the right of God or of the whole to
control them. So that from a good many all sense of authority has passed.
It is characteristic of our age. And it is a stage in our progress toward
real democracy, toward true human liberty.

Observe that relaxed sense of authority in the common attitude toward law.
Most men feel it right to disregard a law of the community which they do
not like. It appears in trivial things. If the community requires that
ashes be kept in a metal receptacle, citizens approve it in general, but
reserve to themselves the right to consider it a foolish law and to do
something else if that is not entirely convenient. If the law says that
paper must not be thrown on the sidewalk, it means little that it is the
law. Those who are inclined to be clean and neat and do not like to see
paper lying around will keep the law; those who are otherwise will be
indifferent to it. That is at the root of the matter-of-course saying that
a law cannot be enforced unless public opinion sustains it. Under any
democratic system laws virtually always have the majority opinion back of
them; but the minority reserve the right to disregard them if they choose,
and the minority will be more aggressive. Rising from those relaxations of
law into far more important ones, it appears that men in business life,
feeling themselves hampered by legislation, set themselves to find a way
to evade it, justifying themselves in doing so. The mere fact that it is
the law does not weigh heavily. This is, however, only an inevitable stage
in progress from the earliest periods of democracy to later and more
substantial periods. It is a stage which will pass. There will come a
democracy where the rule of the whole is frankly recognized, and where
each man holds himself independent of his fellows only in the sense that
he will claim the right to hold such relation to God and his duty as he
himself may apprehend.

In these times, also, the development of temporal and material prosperity
with the intellectual mood which is involved in that affects the attitude
of the age toward the Bible. Sometimes it is spoken of as a scientific age
over against the earlier philosophical ages. Perhaps that will do for a
rough statement of the facts. It is the age of experiment, of trying
things out, and there naturally works into men a feeling that the things
that will yield to the most material scientific experimentation are the
things about which they can be certain and which are of real value. That
naturally involves a good deal of appreciation of the present, and calls
for the improvement of the conditions of present life first of all. It
looks more important to see that a man is well fed, well housed, well
clothed, and well educated than that he should have the interests of
eternity pressed on his attention. That is a comparatively late feeling.
It issues partly from the fact that this is a scientific age, when science
has had its attention turned to the needs of humanity.

Another result of our scientific age is the magnifying of the natural,
while the Bible frankly asserts the supernatural. No effort to get the
supernatural out of the Bible, in order to make it entirely acceptable to
the man who scouts the supernatural, has thus far proved successful. Of
course, the supernatural can be taken out of the Bible; but it will
destroy the Bible. Nor is there much gain in playing with words and
insisting that everything is supernatural or that everything is natural.
There is a difference between the two, and in an age which insists upon
nature or natural laws or forces or events as all-sufficient it is almost
inevitable that the Bible should lose its hold, at least temporarily.

Regarding all this there are some things that need to be said. For one
thing, this, too, is a passing condition. As a matter of fact, men are not
creatures of time. They actually have eternal connections, and the great
outstanding facts which have always made eternity of importance continue.
The fact is that men continue to die, and that the men who are left
behind cannot avoid the sense of mystery and awe which is involved in
that fact. The fact also is that the human emotions cannot be explained on
the lower basis, and the only reason men think they can be is because they
have in the back of their minds the old explanations which they cast into
the lower forms, deceiving themselves into thinking they are new ideas
when they are not.

It ought to be added that the Bible has greatly suffered in all its
history at the hands of men who have believed in it and have fought in its
behalf. Many of the controversies which were hottest were needless and
injurious. All the folly has not been on one side. Some one referred the
other day to a list of more than a hundred scientific theories which were
proposed at the beginning of the last century and abandoned at the end of
it. Scientific men are feeling their way, many of them reverently and
devoutly, some of them rather blatantly and with a readiness for
publication, which hastens them into notoriety. But there has been enough
folly on both sides to make every one go cautiously. It has been remarked
that in Dr. Draper's book _The Conflict Between Science and Religion_ he
makes science appear as a strong-limbed angel of God whereas religion is
always a great ass. The title of the book itself is not fair. In no
proper understanding of the words can there be any conflict between
science and religion. There can be a conflict, as Dr. Andrew D. White puts
it, between science and theology. There can certainly be contest between
scientists and religionists. Science and religion have no conflict.

It is interesting to observe how far back most of the supposed conflicts
actually lie. There is no warfare now; and, while our fathers one or two
generations ago felt that they must fly to the defense of religion against
the attacks of science, no man wastes his strength doing that to-day. That
period has passed. The trouble is that some good people do not know it,
and are just fond enough of a bit of a tussle to keep up the fighting in
the mountain-passes while out in the plain the main armies have laid down
their arms and are busy tilling the soil.

The period of conflict is past, partly because we are learning to
distinguish between the Bible as it really is and certain long-established
ideas about the Bible which came from other sources and have become
attached to it until it seemed to sustain them. The proper doctrine of
evolution is entirely compatible with the Bible. The great Dr. Hodge
declared that the consistent Darwinian must be an atheist. For that
matter, Shelley defended himself by saying that, of course, "the
consistent Newtonian must necessarily be an atheist." But fifty years have
made great changes in the doctrine of evolution, and the old scare has
been over for some time. Newton is honored in the church quite as much as
in the university, and Darwin is not a name to frighten anybody.
Understanding evolution better and knowing the Bible better, the two do
not jangle out of tune so badly but that harmony is promised.

The doctrine of the antiquity of the world is entirely compatible with the
Bible, though it is not compatible with the dates which Archbishop Ussher,
in the time of King James, put at the head of the columns. That is so with
other scientific theories. Any one who has read much of history has
attended the obsequies of so many theories in the realm of science that he
ought to know that he is wasting his strength in trying to bring about a
constant reconciliation between scientific and religious theories. It is
his part to keep an open mind in assurance of the unity of truth, an
assurance that there is no fact which can possibly come to light and no
true theory of facts which can possibly be formed which does not serve the
interest of the truth, which the Bible also presents. The Bible does not
concern itself with all departments of knowledge. So far as mistakes have
been made on the side of those who believe it, they have issued from
forgetting that fact more than from any other one cause.

On the other hand, it has sometimes occurred that believers in the Bible
have been quite too eager to accommodate themselves to purely passing
phases of objection to it. The matter mentioned a moment ago, the excision
of the supernatural, is a case in point. The easy and glib way in which
some have sought to get around difficulties, by talking in large terms
about the progressiveness of the revelation, as though the progress were
from error to truth, instead of from half light to full light, is another
illustration. The nimble way in which we have turned what is given as
history into fiction, and allowed imagination to roam through the Bible,
is another illustration. One of our later writers tells the story of
Jonah, and says it sounds like fiction; why not call it fiction? Another
tells the story of the exodus from Egypt, and says it sounds like fiction;
why not call it fiction? Well, certainly the objection is not to the
presence of fiction in the Bible. It is there, openly, confessedly,
unashamed. Fiction can be used with great profit in teaching religious
truth. But fiction may not masquerade in the guise of history, if men are
to be led by it or mastered by it. If the way to be rid of difficulties in
a narrative is to turn it into pious fiction, there are other instances
where it might be used for relief in emergencies. The story of the
crucifixion of Christ can be told so that it sounds like fiction; why not
call it fiction? Certainly the story of the conversion of Paul can be made
to sound like fiction; why not call it fiction? And there is hardly any
bit of narrative that can be made to sound so like fiction as the landing
of the Pilgrims; why not call that fiction? It is the easy way out; the
difficulties are all gone like Alice's cat, and there is left only the
broad smile of some moral lesson to be learned from the fiction. It is
not, however, the courageous nor the perfectly square way out. Violence
has to be done to the plain narrative; historical statement has to be made
only a mask. And the only reason for it is that there are difficulties not
yet cleared. As for the characters involved, Charles Reade, the novelist,
calling himself "a veteran writer of fiction," declares that the
explanation of these characters, Jonah being one of them, by invention is
incredible and absurd: "Such a man [as himself] knows the artifices and
the elements of art. Here the artifices are absent, and the elements
surpassed." It is not uncommon for one who has found this easy way out of
difficulties to declare with a wave of his hand, that everybody now knows
that this or that book in the Bible is fiction, when, as a matter of fact,
that is not at all an admitted opinion. The Bible will never gain its
place and retain its authority while those who believe in it are spineless
and topple over at the first touch of some one's objection. It could not
be a great Book; it could not serve the purposes of a race if it presented
no problems of understanding and of belief, and all short and easy methods
of getting rid of those problems are certain to leave important elements
of them out of sight.

All this means that the changes of these times rather present additional
reason for a renewed hold on the Bible. It presents what the times
peculiarly need. Instead of making the influence of the Bible impossible,
these changes make the need for the Bible the greater and give it greater
opportunity.

       *       *       *       *       *

Add three notable points at which these times feel and still need the
influence of the Bible. First, they have and still need its literary
influence. So far as its ideas and forces and words are interwoven in the
great literature of the past, it is essential still to the understanding
of that literature. It remains true that English literature, certainly of
the past and also of the present, cannot be understood without knowledge
of the Bible. The Yale professor of literature, quoted so often, says: "It
would be worth while to read the Bible carefully and repeatedly, if only
as a key to modern culture, for to those who are unfamiliar with its
teachings and its diction all that is best in English literature of the
present century is as a sealed book."

From time to time there occur painful reminders of the fact that men
supposed to know literature do not understand it because they are not
familiar with the Bible. Some years ago a college president tested a class
of thirty-four men with a score of extracts from Tennyson, each of which
contained a Scriptural allusion, none of them obscure. The replies were
suggestive and quite appalling. Tennyson wrote, in the "Supposed
Confessions":

    "My sin was a thorn among the thorns that girt Thy brow."

Of these thirty-four young men nine of them did not understand that
quotation. Tennyson wrote:

    "Like Hezekiah's, backward runs
    The shadow of my days."

Thirty-two of the thirty-four did not know what that meant. The meaning of
the line,

    "For I have flung thee pearls and find thee swine,"

was utterly obscure to twenty-two of the thirty-four. One of them said it
was a reference to "good opportunities given but not improved." Another
said it was equivalent to the counsel "not to expect to find gold in a
hay-stack." Even the line,

                      "A Jonah's gourd
    Up in one night, and due to sudden sun,"

was utterly baffling to twenty-eight of the thirty-four. One of them spoke
of it as an "allusion to the uncertainty of the length of life." Another
thought it was a reference to "the occasion of Jonah's being preserved by
the whale." Another counted it "an allusion to the emesis of Jonah by the
whale." Another considered it a reference to "the swallowing of Jonah by a
whale," and yet another considered that it referred to "things grand, but
not worthy of worship because they are perishable." It is amazing to read
that in response to Tennyson's lines,

    "Follow Light and do the Right--for man can half control his doom--
    Till you find the deathless Angel seated in the vacant tomb,"

only sixteen were able to give an explanation of its meaning! The lines
from the "Holy Grail" were equally baffling:

    "Perhaps like Him of Cana in Holy Writ,
    Our Arthur kept his best until the last."

Twenty-four of these thirty-four young men could not recall what that
meant. One said that the keeping of the best wine until the last meant
"waiting till the last moment to be baptized!"

All that may be solely the fault of these young men. Professor Lounsbury
once said that his experience in the class-room had taught him the
infinite capacity of the human mind to withstand the introduction of
knowledge. Very likely earnest effort had been made to teach these young
men the Bible; but it is manifest that they had successfully resisted the
efforts. If Tennyson were the only poet who could not be understood
without knowledge of the Bible, it might not matter so much, but no one
can read Browning nor Carlyle nor Macaulay nor Huxley with entire
intelligence without knowledge of the greater facts and forces of
Scripture. The value of the allusions can be shown by comparing them with
those of mythology. No one can read most of Shelley with entire
satisfaction without a knowledge of Greek mythology. That is one reason
why Shelley has so much passed out of popularity. We do not know Greek
mythology, and we have very largely lost Shelley from our literary
possession. The chief power of these other great writers will go from us
when our knowledge of the Scripture goes.

The danger is not simply with reference to the great literature of the
past. There is danger of losing appreciation of the more delicate touches
of current literature, sometimes of a complete missing of the meaning. An
orator describing present political and social conditions used a fine
phrase, that "it is time the nation camped for a season at the foot of the
mount." Only a knowledge of Bible history will bring as a flash before one
the nation in the desert at Sinai learning the meaning and power of law.
Yet an intelligent man, hearing that remark, said that he counted it a
fine figure, that he thought there did come in the life of every nation a
time before it began its ascent to the heights when it ought to pause and
camp at the foot of the mountain to get its breath! After Lincoln's
assassination Garfield stood on the steps in New York, and said: "Clouds
and darkness are around about him! God reigns and the government at
Washington still lives!" Years after, some one referring to that, said
that it was a beautiful sentence, that the reference to "clouds and
darkness" was a beautiful symbolism, but that Garfield had a great knack
in the building-up of fine phrases! He lacked utterly the background of
the great Psalm which was in Garfield's mind, and which gives that phrase
double meaning. If we go back to Tennyson again, some one has proposed the
inquiry why he should have called one of his poems "Rizpah," since there
was no one of that name mentioned in the whole poem! When, some years ago,
a book was published, _The Children of Gideon_, one of the reviewers could
not understand why that title was used, since no one of that name appeared
in the entire volume. And when Mrs. Wharton's book, _The House of Mirth_,
came out some one spoke of the irony of the title; but it is the irony of
the Scriptures and the book calls for a Scriptural knowledge for its
entire understanding.

Take even an encyclopedia article. Who can understand these two sentences
without instant knowledge of Scripture? "Marlowe and Shakespeare, the
young Davids of the day, tried the armor of Saul before they went out to
battle, then wisely laid it off." "Arnold, like Aaron of old, stands
between the dead and the living; but, unlike Aaron, he holds no smoking
censor of propitiation to stay the plague which he feels to be devouring
his generation."[53] That is in an encyclopedia to which young people are
often referred. What will they make out of it without the Bible? In a
widely distributed school paper, in the question-and-answer department,
occurs the inquiry: "Who composed the inscription on the Liberty Bell?"
The inscription is, "Proclaim liberty throughout all the land to all the
inhabitants thereof."[54] It is to be hoped it was a very young person who
needed to ask who "composed" that expression!

This applies to all the great classics. There has come about a "decay of
literary allusions," as one of our papers editorially says. In much of our
writing, either the transient or the permanent, men can no longer risk
easy reference to classical literature. "Readers of American biography
must often be struck with the important part which literary recollection
played in the life of a cultured person a generation or two ago. These men
had read Homer, Xenophon and Virgil, Shakespeare, Byron and Wordsworth,
Lamb, De Quincey and Coleridge. They were not afraid of being called
pedants because they occasionally used a Latin phrase or referred to some
great name of Greece or Rome." That is not so commonly true to-day.
Especially is there danger of losing easy acquaintance with the great
Bible references.

There are familiar reasons for it. For one thing, there has been a great
increase of literature. Once there was little to read, and that little
became familiar. One would have been ashamed to pretend to culture and not
to know such literature well. Now there is so much that one cannot know it
all, and most men follow the line of least resistance. That line is not
where great literature lies. Once the problem was how to get books enough
for a family library. Now the problem is how to get library enough for the
books. Magazines, papers, volumes of all grades overflow. "The Bible has
been buried beneath a landslide of books." The result is that the greatest
literary landmark of the English tongue threatens to become unknown, or
else to be looked upon as of antiquarian rather than present worth. There
our Puritan fathers had the advantage. As President Faunce puts it: "For
them the Bible was the norm and goal of all study. They had achieved the
concentration of studies, and the Bible was the center. They learned to
read that they might read the literature of Israel; their writing was
heavy with noble Old Testament phrases; the names of Old Testament heroes
they gave to their children; its words of immortal hope they inscribed on
their tombstones; its Mosaic commonwealth they sought to realize in
England and America; its decalogue was the foundation of their laws, and
its prophecies were a light shining in a dark place. Such a unification of
knowledge produced a unified character, simple, stalwart, invincible." It
is very different in our own day. As so-called literature increases it
robs great literature of its conspicuous outstanding character, and many
men who pride themselves on the amount they read would do far better to
read a thousandth part as much and let that smaller part be good.

Another reason for this decay of the influence of literary knowledge of
the Bible is the shallowness of much of our thinking. If the Bible were
needed for nothing else in present literary life, it would be needed for
the deepening of literary currents. The vast flood of flotsam and jetsam
which pours from the presses seldom floats on a deep current. It is
surface matter for the most part. It does not take itself seriously, and
it is quite impossible to take it seriously. It does not deal with great
themes, or when it touches upon them it deals with them in a trifling way.
To men interested chiefly in literature of this kind the Bible cannot be
of interest.

That is a passing condition, and out of it is certain to come here and
there a masterpiece of literature. When it does appear, it will be found
to reveal the same influences that have made great literature in the past,
issuing more largely from the Bible than from any other book. That is the
main point of a bit of counsel which Professor Bowen used to give his
Harvard students. To form a good English style, he told them, a student
ought to keep near at hand a Bible, a volume of Shakespeare, and Bacon's
essays. That group of books would enlarge the vocabulary, would supply a
store of words, phrases, and allusions, and save the necessity of
ransacking a meager and hide-bound diction in order to make one's meaning
plain. Coleridge in his _Table-Talk_ adds that "intense study of the Bible
will keep any writer from being _vulgar_ in point of style." So it may be
urged that these times have and still need the literary influence of the
Bible.

Add that the times have and still need its moral steadying. Every age
seems to its own thoughtful people to lack moral steadiness, and they
tend to compare it with other ages which look steadier. That is a
virtually invariable opinion of such men. The comparison with other ages
is generally fallacious, yet the fact is real for each age. Many things
tend in this age to unsettle moral solidity. Some of them are peculiar to
this time, others are not. But one of the great influences which the Bible
is perpetually tending to counteract is stated in best terms in an
experience of Henry M. Stanley. It was on that journey to Africa when he
found David Livingstone, under commission from one of the great
newspapers. Naturally he had made up his load as light as possible. Of
books he had none save the Bible; but wrapped about his bottles of
medicine and other articles were many copies of newspapers. Stanley says
that "strangest of all his experiences were the changes wrought in him by
the reading of the Bible and those newspapers in melancholy Africa." He
was frequently sick with African fever, and took up the Bible to while
away his hours of recovery. During the hours of health he read the
newspapers. "And thus, somehow or other, my views toward newspapers were
entirely recast," while he held loyal to his profession as a newspaper
man. This is the critical sentence in Stanley's telling of the story: "As
seen in my loneliness, there was this difference between the Bible and the
newspapers. The one reminded me that apart from God my life was but a
bubble of air, and it made me remember my Creator; the other fostered
arrogance and worldliness."[55] There is no denying such an experience as
that. That is precisely the moral effect of the Bible as compared with the
moral effect of the newspaper accounts of current life. Democracy should
always be happy; but it must always be serious, morally steady. Anything
that tends to give men light views of wrong, to make evil things humorous,
to set out the ridiculous side of gross sins is perilous to democracy. It
not only is injurious to personal morals; it is bound sooner or later to
injure public morals. There is nothing that so persistently counteracts
that tendency of current literature as does the Bible.

From an ethical point of view, "the ethical content of Paul is quite as
important for us as the system of Schopenhauer or Nietzsche. The
organization of the New England town meeting is no more weighty for the
American boy than the organization of the early Christian Church. John
Adams and John Hancock and Abraham Lincoln are only the natural
successors of the great Hebrew champions of liberty and righteousness who
faced Pharoah and Ahab and put to flight armies of aliens." But aside from
the definite ethical teaching of the Bible there is need for that strong
impression of ethical values which it gives in the characters around which
it has gathered. The conception of the Bible which makes it appear as a
steady progression should add to its authority, not take from it. The
development is not from error to truth, but from light to more light. It
is sometimes said that the standards of morality of some parts of
Scripture are not to be commended. But they are not the standards of
morality of Scripture, but of their times. They are not taught in
Scripture; they are only stated; and they are so stated that instantly a
thoughtful man discovers that they are stated to be condemned. When did it
become true that all that is told of a good man is to be approved? It is
not pretended that Abraham did right always. David was confessedly wrong.
They move much of the time in half-light, yet the sum total of the
impression of their writings is inevitably and invariably for a more
substantial morality. These times need the moral steadying of the Bible to
make men, not creatures of the day and not creatures of their whims, but
creatures of all time and of fundamental laws.

Add the third fact, that our times have and still need the religious
influence of the Bible. No democracy can dispense with religious culture.
No book makes for religion as does the Bible. That is its chief purpose.
No book can take its place; no influence can supplant it. Max Muller made
lifelong study of the Buddhist and other Indian books. He gave them to the
English-speaking world. Yet he wrote to a friend of his impression of the
immense superiority of the Bible in such terms that his friend replied:
"Yes, you are right; how tremendously ahead of other sacred books is the
Bible! The difference strikes one as almost unfairly great."[56] Writing
in an India paper, _The Kayestha Samachar_, in August, 1902, a Hindu
writer said: "I am not a Christian; but half an hour's study of the Bible
will do more to remodel a man than a whole day spent in repeating the
slokas of the Purinas or the mantras of the Rig-Veda." In the earlier
chapters of the Koran Christians are frequently spoken of as "people of
the Book." It is a suggestive phrase. If Christianity has any value for
American life, then the Bible has just that value. Christianity is made
by the Bible; it has never been vital nor nationally influential for good
without the Bible.

Sometimes, because of his strong words regarding the conflict between
science and theology, the venerable American diplomat and educator, Dr.
Andrew D. White, is thought of as a foe to religion. No one who reads his
biography can have that impression half an hour. Near the close of it is a
paragraph of singular insight and authority which fits just this
connection: "It will, in my opinion, be a sad day for this or for any
people when there shall have come in them an atrophy of the religious
nature; when they shall have suppressed the need of communication, no
matter how vague, with a supreme power in the universe; when the ties
which bind men of similar modes of thought in the various religious
organizations shall be dissolved; when men, instead of meeting their
fellow-men in assemblages for public worship which give them a sense of
brotherhood, shall lounge at home or in clubs; when men and women, instead
of bringing themselves at stated periods into an atmosphere of prayer,
praise, and aspiration, to hear the discussion of higher spiritual themes,
to be stirred by appeals to their nobler nature in behalf of faith, hope,
and charity, and to be moved by a closer realization of the fatherhood of
God and the brotherhood of man, shall stay at home and give their thoughts
to the Sunday papers, or to the conduct of their business, or to the
languid search for some refuge from boredom."[57] Those are wise, strong
words, and they sustain to the full what has been urged, that these times
still need the religious influence of the Bible.

The influence of the Bible on the literary, moral, and religious life of
the times is already apparent. But that influence needs to be constantly
strengthened. There remains, therefore, to suggest some methods of giving
the Bible increasing power. It should be recognized first and last that
only thoughtful people will do it. No help will come from careless people.
Moreover, only people who believe in the common folk will do it. Those who
are aristocrats in the sense that they do not believe that common people
can be trusted will not concern themselves to increase the power of the
Bible. But for those who are thoughtful and essentially democratic the
duty is a very plain one. There are four great agencies which may well
magnify the Bible and whose influence will bring the Bible into increasing
power in national life.

First among these, of course, must be the Church. The accent which it will
place on the Bible will naturally be on its religious value, though its
moral value will take a close second place. It is essential for the Church
to hold itself true to its religious foundations. Only men who have some
position of leadership can realize the immense pressure that is on to-day
to draw the Church into forms of activity and methods of service which are
much to be commended, but which have to be constantly guarded lest they
deprive it of power and concern in the things which are peculiar to its
own life and which it and it alone can contribute to the public good. The
Church needs to develop for itself far better methods of instruction in
the Bible, so that it may as far as possible drill those who come under
its influence in the knowledge of the Bible for its distinctive religious
value. This is neither the time nor the place for a full statement of that
responsibility. It is enough to see how the very logic of the life of the
Church requires that it return with renewed energy to its magnifying and
teaching of the Bible.

The second agency which may be called upon is the press. The accent of the
press will be on the moral value of the Bible, the service which its
teaching renders to the national and personal life. There seems to be a
hopeful returning tendency to allusions to the Scripture in newspaper and
magazine publications. It is rare to find among the higher-level
newspapers an editorial page, where the most thoughtful writing appears,
in which on any day there do not appear Scripture allusions or references.
When that is seriously done, when Scripture is used for some other purpose
than to point a jest, it helps to restore the Bible to its place in public
thought. In recent years there has been a noticeable return of the greater
magazines to consideration of the moral phrases of the Scripture. That has
been inevitably connected with the development of a social sense which
condemns men for their evil courses because of their damage to society.
The Old Testament prophets are living their lives again in these days, and
the more thoughtful men are being driven back to them for the great
principles on which they may live safely.

The third agency which needs to magnify the Bible is the school. The
accent which it will choose will naturally be the literary value of the
Bible, though it will not overlook its moral value as well. Incidental
references heretofore have suggested the importance of religion in a
democracy. But there are none of the great branches of the teaching of the
schools, public or private, which do not involve the Bible. It is
impossible to teach history fairly and fully without a frank recognition
of the influence of the Bible. Study the Reformation, the Puritan
movement, the Pilgrim journeys, the whole of early American history! We
can leave the Bible out only by trifling with the facts. Certainly
literature cannot be taught without it. And if it is the purpose of the
schools to develop character and moral life, then there is high authority
for saying that the Bible ought to have place.

Forty years ago Mr. Huxley, in his essay on "The School Boards: What They
Can Do, and What They May Do," laid a broad foundation for thinking at
this point, and his words bear quoting at some length: "I have always been
strongly in favor of secular education, in the sense of education without
theology; but I must confess I have been no less seriously perplexed to
know by what practical measures the religious feeling, which is the
essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly
chaotic state of opinion on these matters, without the use of the Bible.
The pagan moralists lack life and color, and even the noble stoic, Marcus
Aurelius Antoninus, is too high and refined for an ordinary child. Take
the Bible as a whole; make the severest deductions which fair criticism
can dictate for shortcomings and positive errors; eliminate, as a sensible
lay teacher would do if left to himself, all that is not desirable for
children to occupy themselves with; and there still remains in this old
literature a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur. And then consider
the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this Book has been
woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history;
that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is as familiar to
noble and simple, from John-o'-Groat's House to Land's End, as Dante and
Tasso once were to the Italians; that it is written in the noblest and
purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form;
and, finally, that it forbids the veriest hind who never left his village
to be ignorant of the existence of other countries and other
civilizations, and of a great past, stretching back to the furthest limits
of the oldest nations of the world. By the study of what other book could
children be so much humanized and made to feel that each figure in that
vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space
in the interval between two eternities; and earns the blessings or the
curses of all time, according to its effort to do good and hate evil,
even as they also are earning their payment for their work? On the whole,
then, I am in favor of reading the Bible, with such grammatical,
geographical, and historical explanations by a lay teacher as may be
needful, with rigid exclusion of any further theological teaching than
that contained in the Bible itself." Mr. Huxley is an Englishman, though,
as Professor Moulton says, "We divide him between England and America."
But Professor Moulton himself is very urgent in this same matter. If the
classics of Greece and Rome are in the nature of ancestral literature, an
equal position belongs to the literature of the Bible. "If our intellect
and imagination have been formed by Greece, have we not in similar fashion
drawn our moral and emotional training from Hebrew thought?" It is one of
the curiosities of our civilization that we are content to go for our
liberal education to literatures which morally are at opposite poles from
ourselves; literatures in which the most exalted tone is often an
apotheosis of the sensuous, which degrade divinity, not only to the human
level, but to the lowest level of humanity. "It is surely good that our
youth during the formative period should have displayed to them, in a
literary dress as brilliant as that of Greek literature, a people
dominated by an utter passion for righteousness, a people whose ideas of
purity, of infinite good, of universal order, of faith in the irresistible
downfall of moral evil, moved to a poetic passion as fervid and speech as
musical as when Sappho sang of love or Eschylus thundered his deep notes
of destiny."[58]

But there is a leading American voice which will speak in that behalf, in
President Nicholas Murray Butler, of Columbia University. In his address
as President of the National Educational Association, President Butler
makes strong plea for the reading of the Bible even in public schools.
"His reason had no connection with religion. It was based on altogether
different ground. He regarded an acquaintance with the Bible as absolutely
indispensable to the proper understanding of English literature." It is
unfortunate in the extreme, he thought, that so many young men are growing
up without that knowledge of the Bible which every one must have if he
means to be capable of the greatest literary pleasure and appreciation of
the literature of his own people. Not only the allusions, but the whole
tone and bias of many English authors will become to one who is ignorant
of the Bible most difficult and even impossible of comprehension.

The difficulties of calling public schools to this task appear at once. It
would be monstrous if they should be sectarian or proselytizing. But the
Bible is not a sectarian Book. It is the Book of greatest literature. It
is the Book of mightiest morals. It is governing history. It is affecting
literature as nothing else has done. A thousand pities that any petty
squabbling or differences of opinion should prevent the young people in
the schools from realizing the grandeur and beauty of it!

But the final and most important agency which will magnify the influence
of the Bible must necessarily be the home. It will gather up all its
traits, religious, moral, and literary. Here is the fundamental
opportunity and the fundamental obligation. Robert Burns was right in
finding the secret of Scotia's power in such scenes as those of "The
Cottar's Saturday Night." One can almost see Carlyle going back to his old
home at Ecclefechan and standing outside to hear his old mother making a
prayer in his behalf. A newspaper editorial of recent date says this decay
of literary allusion is traceable in part to the gradual abandonment of
family prayers. Answering President Butler, it is urged that it is not so
important that the Bible be in the public schools as that it get back
again into the homes. "Thorough acquaintance with the Bible is desirable;
it should be fostered. The person who will have to foster it, though,"
says this writer, "is not the teacher, but the parent. The parent is the
person whom Dr. Butler should try to convert." Well, while there may be
differences about the school, there can be none about the place of the
Bible in the home. It needs to be bound up with the earliest impressions
and intertwined with those impressions as they deepen and extend.

So, by the Church, which will accent its religious value; by the press,
which will accent its moral power; by the school, which will spread its
literary influence; and by the home, which will realize all three and make
it seem a vital concern from the beginning of life, the Bible will be put
and held in the place of power to-day which it has had in the years that
are gone, and will steadily gain greater power.

FOOTNOTES:

[52] Jefferson, _Things Fundamental_, p. 90.

[53] _New International Encyclopedia_, art. on English Literature.

[54] _Current Events_, January 12, 1912.

[55] _Autobiography_, p. 252.

[56] Speer, _Light of the World_, iv.

[57] _Autobiography_, vol. ii, p. 570.

[58] _Literary Study of the Bible_, passim.


THE END

       *       *       *       *       *


TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES

Occasional missing punctuation marks have been inserted.

The variant forms non-conformity (p. 50) and non-conforming (pp. 227, 229)
appear in this text.

On p. 71, "Illustrate with one instance" should perhaps read "I'll
illustrate with one instance" but has been left unchanged.

The following amendments have been made to the text:

On p. 36 "Crammer" amended to "Cranmer".

On p. 109 "eighty two" amended to "eighty-two".

On p. 112 "Waverly" amended to "Waverley".

On p. 117 "(verse 51,)" amended to "(verse 51),".

On p. 133 "Edgar Allen Poe" amended to "Edgar Allan Poe".

On p. 141 "exile of ths scholars" amended to "exile of the scholars".

On p. 142 "Capel Lloft" amended to "Capel Lofft".

On p. 157 footnote, "English Literature" italicised as "_English
Literature_".

On p. 161 "Tintern Abbay" amended to "Tintern Abbey".

On p. 170 "'Drama of Exile" amended to "Drama of Exile".

On p. 174 "every growing courtier" amended to "every grinning courtier".

On p. 232 "democracry" amended to "democracy".

On p. 234 "Just that it did" amended to "Just what it did"; and "pleasure
Sabbath" amended to "pleasure of Sabbath".

On p. 243 "Khayyam" amended to "Khayyam"; and "in more marked way" amended
to "in a more marked way".

On p. 254 "is authority" amended to "is the authority".

On p. 281 "phases" amended to "phrases".





End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Greatest English Classic, by
Cleland Boyd McAfee

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