"As a mere literary monument, the English of the Bible remains the noblest example of the English tongue, while its perpetual use made it from the instant of its appearance the standard of our language."—John Richard Green.

CHAPTER X.

THE BIBLE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE.

THE hundred years which lie between 1550 and 1650 gave birth to more men who were destined to great literary distinction than has any other period of equal length in English history. To understand how true this is, it is only necessary that we try, for a moment, to conceive what our literature would be were that century dropped out of our annals. So much was it the flower and crown of the years which preceded it, and so much has it molded and inspired the years which have followed, that in case this century was lost, it is really hard to see what would be left. Never was nobler thought wedded to a richer tongue. This, indeed, was its special glory, and to this hour does it remain its supreme distinction. Recall the names of only a few of the writers who made this age illustrious. When was literary form finer, when was intellectual vigor more abundant? To lose that hundred years would be to lose Raleigh, who turned to literature after the most brilliant course ever run by a soldier of fortune, and doing so added fresh lustre to his renown; and Spenser, who gave his name to the stanza which errs only, if it err

at all, by excess of sweetness; and Hooker, almost alone in the host of theologians for his command of stately prose; and Shakespeare, with the peerlessness of his range; and Isaac Walton, who represents the best speech of our daily life, and who has taught us how to bait our hook, in language which almost makes us envy the worm dying to such pleasant music; and Jeremy Taylor, the poet of the pulpit, and his rival, Robert South, who wielded as no other Englishman has the dangerous weapons of irony and scorn. Nor would the loss be any less in the sphere of thought. What should we do without Bacon, who makes science as clear as a summer brook; and quaint George Herbert, the most devout of our English poets; and Milton, who moved as masterfully among his words as Satan amid his legions; and Leighton, the divine, so rich in unction; and Owen, the theologian, more voluminous than luminous indeed, but treading serenely lofty levels of holy speculation; and Baxter, whose fervor glows forever in his impetuous appeals; and Bunyan, who, by virtue of his marvelous familiarity with the soul's pilgrimage, traveled all the road from Destruction to Deliverance, and closed with notes that even an angel before the throne might emulate? The loss of such a period as this hundred years would be not so much the loss of the keystone to the arch, as the loss of the arch itself, and that the centre-arch

in the bridge of English literature. Where we looked for the highest point and the surest footing we should find, to our dismay, not a delightful thoroughfare, but only a dangerous chasm with a threatening torrent in its depths.

Now it was when this great century was at its full tide of literary splendor that the Authorized Version of the English Bible saw the light. At once it put itself into a place where it challenged comparison with the masterpieces of our tongue. How triumphantly it has stood the test, all the years since have shown. A sagacious critic of our own times expresses the universal conviction, when, speaking of it in the same breath with "The Divine Comedy" of Dante, Milton's "Paradise Lost," and Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables," he characterizes our English Bible as "great art." Addressing himself to those who might possibly make journalism their profession, Mr. Charles A. Dana, a master of his craft, has said lately: "There are some books that are absolutely indispensable to the kind of education that we are contemplating and to the profession that we are considering; and of all these the most indispensable, the most useful, the one whose knowledge is most effective, is the Bible. There is no book from which more valuable lessons can be learned. I am considering it now, not as a religious book, but as a manual of utility, of professional preparation and professional

use for a journalist. There is, perhaps, no book whose style is more suggestive and more instructive, from which you learn more directly that sublime simplicity which never exaggerates, which recounts the greatest event with solemnity of course, but without sentimentality or affectationnone which you open with such confidence and lay down with such reverence: there is no book like the Bible." Such estimates as these are only samples from the accumulating testimonies of men of high attainments to the worth of our English Bible as literature.

1

But we must not be understood as claiming for the language of the Bible in our hands to-day that it originated in the reign of James I. To do justice to the influence of this one book upon our literature, we must go much farther back than this. As the first sounds which the infant catches are often the syllables of some pious nursery rhyme, so our language listened in its earliest days to the very truths, and in many instances, to the very words now embalmed in our own Bible.

1. First of all, in our study of the influence of this book upon our literature, we must notice how powerfully it told upon the history of the language. Familiar as we are with the fact that in the present century Christian missionaries have in many instances made a language and a literature for

1 Address at Union College, Schenectady, 1893.