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.