The VENERABLE BEDE, "The father of English literature," was bora
about 672 in the county of Durham. The Anglo-Saxons, whose earliest
historian he was, had been converted by St. Austin and others by the
then not unusual process of preaching to the king until he was
persuaded to renounce heathenism both for himself and his
subjects. Bede, though born among a people not greatly addicted
either to religion or letters, became a remarkable preacher,
scholar, and thinker. Professionally a preacher, his sermons are
interesting, chiefly because they are the earliest specimens of
oratory extant from any Anglo-Saxon public speaker.
Best known as the author of the 'Ecclesiastical History of England,'
Bede was a most prolific writer. He left a very considerable
collection of sermons or homilies, many of which are still
extant. He also wrote on science, on poetic art, on medicine,
philosophy, and rhetoric, not to mention his hymns and his 'Book of
Epigrams in Heroic and Elegaic Verse'--all very interesting and some
of them valuable, as any one may see who will take the trouble to
read them in his simple and easily understood Latin. It is a pity,
however, that they are not adequately translated and published in a
shape which would make the father of English eloquence the first
English rhetorician, as he was the first English philosopher, poet,
and historian, more readily accessible to the general public.
Bede's sermons deal very largely in allegory, and though he may have
been literal in his celebrated suggestions of the horrors of hell--
which were certainly literally understood by his hearers--it is
pertinent to quote in connection with them his own assertion, that
"he who knows how to interpret allegorically will see that the inner
sense excels the simplicity of the letter as apples do leaves."
Bede's reputation spread not only through England but throughout
Western Europe and to Rome. Attempts were made to thrust honors on
him, but he refused them for fear they would prevent him from
learning. He taught in a monastery at Jarrow where at one time he
had six hundred monks and many strangers attending on his
discourses.
He died in 735, just as he had completed the first translation of
the Gospel of John ever made into any English dialect. The present
Anglo-Saxon version, generally in use among English students, is
supposed to include that version if not actually to present its
exact language. The King James version comes from Bede's in a direct
line of descent through Wycliff and Tyndale.