DURING the recent celebrations connected with the Tercentenary of the Authorised Version of the Scriptures a feature worthy of note is the number of striking testimonies borne to the Bible, alike as a religious and literary classic. We are not forgetful that all is not gold that glitters; but it is decidedly something to be thankful for that the Word of God has been so prominently brought before the English-speaking race during the past months. The United States and Canada celebrated the Tercentenary during last month, and there, as in the homeland, the Bible was brought prominently before the mixed peoples of these vigorous nations. The testimonies quoted here are chiefly those given at the English and Scottish celebrations, and are fitted to teach men who regard it as a sign of culture and literary taste to scoff at the Bible, that they have still a great deal to learn.
We begin, as is meet, with the King’s speech in answer to the Address presented to him by the deputation including representatives of the Church of England, Church of Scotland, Congregationalists, Baptists, Wesleyans, Primitive Methodists, United Methodists, Friends, Moravians, Presbyterian Church of England, Salvation Army, Welsh Calvinistic Methodists, Church of Ireland, and many other public bodies.
“It has given me sincere pleasure,” the King said, “to receive this deputation, and to learn that it represents the joint celebration by the English-speaking peoples of the issue of 1611 of that world-famous translation of the Bible into our tongue, which has ever since been known as the Authorised Version. The happily-chosen words of the Address bring home to us all the profound importance of that event. The labours of the translators, and of my ancestor, King James the First, who directed and watched over their undertaking, deserve to be held in lasting honour.
“This glorious and memorable achievement, coming like a broad light in the darkness, gave freely to the whole English-speaking people the right and the power to search for themselves for the truths and consolations of our faith, and during three hundred years the multiplying millions of the English-speaking races—spreading ever more widely over the surface of the globe—have turned in their need to the grand simplicity of the Authorised Version, and have drawn upon its inexhaustible springs of wisdom, courage, and joy.
“It is my confident hope—confirmed by the widespread interest your movement has aroused—that my subjects may never cease to cherish their noble inheritance in the English Bible, which in a secular aspect is the first of national treasures, and is, as you truly say, in its spiritual significance the most valuable thing that this world affords.”
Lord Northampton, in the name of the signatories to the Address, then presented the Bible, and His Majesty before retiring cordially shook hands with every member of the deputation.
At the Tercentenary celebration in London, which took place on the 29th March by a great meeting in the Albert Hall, the American Ambassador (Mr. Reid) read a letter from the President of the United States, in which Mr. Taft says:—”It affords me great pleasure to present, through Mr. Reid, my congratulations to those who, in the mother country, are commemorating so signal a historic event as the publication of the King James Version of the English Bible. This Book of Books has not only reigned supreme in England for three centuries, but has bound together, as nothing else could, two great Anglo-Saxon nations, one in blood, in speech, and in a common religion. Our laws, our literature, and our social life owe whatever excellence they possess largely to the influence of this our chief classic—acknowledged as such equally on both sides of the sea.”
The Times, which occupies the first place in the newspaper press of the world, has devoted a good deal of its space to the subject, and in a special article says, among other things:—”The Authorised Version of the Bible is a piece of literature without parallel in modern times. Other countries, of course, have their translations of the Bible, but they are not great works of art. . . . Now that we have so many cheap substitutes for literature it is more than ever necessary that every one from childhood should be familiar with the Bible, not as a book which proves something or which contains curious information, but as one which says what is best worth saying in the best possible words. Such a familiarity with it ought to be considered the foundation of all culture among us, and we ought to learn it at school as the Greeks learned Homer, and to be able to quote from it without any false shame and without suggesting any controversy about theological matters. It is important to every one to know the Bible from childhood, for there is no great literature in our own tongue, or perhaps in any other, which a child can so easily enjoy. The child who knows the tales of the Patriarchs . . . has a standard by which he can distinguish the enduring from the transient in the life of man. He may never consciously apply this standard. Yet it is likely to remain in his mind and to influence his judgments. The Bible, read in childhood, makes us love those things which are best worth loving and which have been tested by the experience of ages. The fact that it came from the East, and has been naturalised in the West—that the Englishman has fathered what the Jew so long ago begot—is a proof of its universal value. It has endured a severer struggle for life than any other book, and in the course of it has more completely rid itself of everything that is trivial and accidental and unfitted to survive. Living, as it does, in our language more vigorously than even the greatest works of our own writers, it gives us a living memory of the central past of the world; so that we, who came into history so late, and out of a dark, northern byway, can look back across the shining Mediterranean to the primeval Mesopotamia as if it were the cradle of our own race, from which we had wandered, carrying with us westward the stories that were to last for ever through all vicissitudes of time and place.”
The Daily Telegraph, one of the great London dailies, in the course of a very notable leading article of 21st March says:— “Cromwell and his Ironsides, for instance, owed all their stark strength and conquering capacity not to physique, in which they might be equalled before and since, nor to pure intellect, for in that, thoroughly able as many of them were, they have been very frequently indeed excelled by meaner men, but to a force and fixity of character in which they have never been surpassed. Without that the Puritan movement and the stern stamp it was to set on our history, and on all history, would have been impossible. The Ironsides, with the sword in one hand and the Bible in the other, was first of all made by the latter, creating in men the temper that lifted them far above what they would have been under any other influence. In the meantime while tumults shook the State in the clash of the deepest differences of conviction by which a nation can be divided, something else was happening. The ‘Mayflower’ had made her voyage to New England, the Pilgrim Fathers taking the English Bible with them as by far the most precious treasure in their store. The American colonies began to build up their new Commonwealths and to stretch along the seaboard. It might be said that of these societies on the other side of the Atlantic—certainly of the strongest among them, bound to dominate as in the end they did—the Authorised Version was the moral foundation-stone. It was under the influence of the Book of Books that England became, indeed, the mother of nations, and stretched her race and her tongue to the farthest shores of the earth. To-day the English-speaking world embraces something like 150,000,000 of people, who contain within themselves more potential of every kind than has ever belonged to any group of communities owning the same language and a common literature. In that sense, at least, there has never been, and there never can be, a real separation. In that sense, the English-speaking peoples in the mass are fundamentally one, and the influence of the English Bible upon their speech, thought, and ideas is the deepest and broadest part of all that gives them a common moral basis. Had it not been for that, there would have been no special virtue in Sir Edward Grey’s plea for Anglo-American peace. But the Tercentenary of the English Bible is every whit as much America’s festival as ours, and the celebration of the event on both sides should do more than anything else could accomplish during the next few weeks to strengthen all the moral forces that will work henceforward for a crowning cause. Three hundred years ago the English Bible was the possession of but five or six millions of people, in an island which could not guess what the future was to bring forth. To-day the seed has risen into a great tree, and its branches overshadow the earth.”
Prof. Saintsbury, in a special article to the Glasgow Herald (4th March, 1911), pays a high compliment to the literary style of the Authorised Version. “The astounding skill, he says, “with which the translators of 1611 took the best from everything, and added better of their own, can only be appreciated by actual comparison of the different texts. But it may perhaps need some additional acquaintance with literature from the historical side to see the hold which the result obtained upon the national and the literary mind. . . . The phraseology and style of the Bible in the Version which by no very slow degrees superseded all the others, supplied as it were a publica materies, a universally-known common stock and ground of literary expression to which there is, if any parallel at all in literature, only that supplied by Homer in the flourishing times of Greek. . . . It has been customary to attribute the discovery of the indefinable, but at once recognisable, ‘Biblical cadence’ to Tyndale; and it may be fairly granted that he was actually the first to ‘glimpse the panther,’ which is the less surprising in that he was actually the first man of literary talent to apply a tolerably accomplished stage of English to the particular text and task. But neither in him (indeed he does not seem to have had time to attempt the greatest books) nor in any follower or set of followers, will be found anything like the astounding finish, fulness, and variety of the Authorised Version in dealing with matter like the Days of Creation, and the Exit of Israel, with Job and Ecclesiastes and the great passages at the beginning and end of Isaiah, with the visions of Ezekiel and the preaching of Amos, with the narrative quality of the Gospels and the Acts, with the more purple passages of the Epistles, and with the hues of sunset and eclipse that colour the Book of Revelation. Nor, great as is purely Elizabethan prose, will anything similar or second be found in it.”
The English Churchman, in a leading article (23rd March, 1911), strikes a different note—a note which we are sure will appeal to the readers of this Magazine. “What is this Book,” it asks, “which has been enthroned so high above all other literature and is the crowned queen among the grandest works of the ages? What is this Book that is receiving the homage of all ranks and classes, from the King to the peasant, from the university scholar to the backwoodsman in the wilds of the West? They tell us that it contains the purest English ever written. Of the words that go to make pure English it has 97 per cent., as against 85 per cent. in Shakespeare and 81 per cent. in ‘Paradise Lost.’ And yet it has so entered into the language of the people, and exercised such a formative influence upon their everyday utterances, that of its six thousand words only about two hundred are not in common use. Writers of all kinds have extolled the beauty of its diction, the felicity of its phrases, and the sublimity of its style. But true as this is, it could never account for the position that our Authorised Version has won. Pious friends do not bestow this gift-book upon children simply to teach them elegance or to save them from barbarities of speech. When the mother, with a tear-dimmed eye, begs her boy to remember his Bible and to read if only a few verses every day in the far-off land to which he is going, she is thinking of something very different from the dignified preservation of his native tongue. When the Book goes down with the mourner into the abyss of sorrow and keeps him from sinking into despair, it is not alone by the music of its sentences and the rhythm of its cadences that it speaks to his riven heart. When the aged saint reads over again the familiar passages on which his mind is wont to dwell, the mere felicity of the phrases will not account for the light that kindles on his face like a ray from the sunshine of heaven. No, we yield to none in our admiration of the English of the Authorised Version, but we are not foolish enough to imagine that this has been the sole secret of its power. . . .
“There is something more, then, in the old Book, which has been working in the nation for three hundred years and is working still, whose light is not yet dim nor its natural force abated. Yes, there is something more. It is the Word of God, and it has proved its origin by its achievements. The Holy Spirit, using it as His instrument, has enlightened the darkness of untold multitudes, pointed them to the Saviour, shown them the path of life, guided them in their pilgrimage, strengthened them to overcome temptation, implanted in them the principles of truth and righteousness, made them missionaries to others, consoled them in their sorrows, and filled them with the hope of immortality. By these glorious achievements He has set the English Bible on its throne and bent the minds of myriads to pay their tribute to it to-day.”
These are a few of the tributes paid to the Bible during the recent celebrations, and our prayer is that the God of the Bible may so order it that through these celebrations more attention may be given to His Word, and that His Holy Spirit may make it an effectual means of salvation to many a perishing sinner.
D. B.