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The Greatest English Classic

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Title: The Greatest English Classic

Author: Cleland Boyd McAfee


        
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE GREATEST ENGLISH CLASSIC ***

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, Cædmon, 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 Cædmon died, and the romance
of the story makes it one of the finest in our literature. Cædmon 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 Khayyám" 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
_Æsop'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.

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