I shall ask you then, first, to assent with me, that the Authorised
Version of the Holy Bible is, as a literary achievement, one of the
greatest in our language; nay, with the possible exception of the
complete works of Shakespeare, the very greatest. You will
certainly not deny this.
As little, or less, will you deny that more deeply than any other
book--more deeply even than all the writings of Shakespeare--far
more deeply--it has influenced our literature. Here let me repeat
a short passage from a former lecture of mine (May 15, 1913, five
years ago). I had quoted some few glorious sentences such as:
Thine eyes shall see the king in his beauty: they shall
behold the land that is very far off.
And a man shall be as an hiding-place from the wind, and a
covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place,
as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land....
So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption,
and this mortal shall have put on immortality ...
and having quoted these I went on:
When a nation has achieved this manner of diction, these
rhythms for its dearest beliefs, a literature is surely
established.... Wyclif, Tyndale, Coverdale and others before
the forty-seven had wrought. The Authorised Version, setting
a seal on all, set a seal on our national style.... It has
cadences homely and sublime, yet so harmonises them that
the voice is always one. Simple men--holy and humble men
of heart like Isaak Walton and Bunyan--have their lips
touched and speak to the homelier tune. Proud men, scholars
--Milton, Sir Thomas Browne--practise the rolling Latin
sentence; but upon the rhythms of our Bible they, too, fall
back--'The great mutations of the world are acted, or time may
be too short for our designs.' 'Acquaint thyself with the
Choragium of the stars.' 'There is nothing immortal but
immortality.' The precise man Addison cannot excel one parable
in brevity or in heavenly clarity: the two parts of Johnson's
antithesis come to no more than this 'Our Lord has gone up to
the sound of a trump; with the sound of a trump our Lord has
gone up.' The Bible controls its enemy Gibbon as surely as it
haunts the curious music of a light sentence of Thackeray's. It
is in everything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in
our blood.
If that be true, or less than gravely overstated: if the English
Bible hold this unique place in our literature; if it be at once
a monument, an example and (best of all) a well of English
undefiled, no stagnant water, but quick, running, curative,
refreshing, vivifying; may we not agree, Gentlemen, to require
the weightiest reason why our instructors should continue to
hedge in the temple and pipe the fountain off in professional
conduits, forbidding it to irrigate freely our ground of study?
It is done so complacently that I do not remember to have met one
single argument put up in defence of it; and so I am reduced to
guess-work. What can be the justifying reason for an embargo on
the face of it so silly and arbitrary, if not senseless?