[32] Strong, _The Theology of the Poets_.
[33] _History of England_, vol. III., p. 220.
[34] Taine, _English Literature_, II., 279.
[35] June 14, 1830.
[36] Morley, _Life of Gladstone_, vol. iii, p. 424.
[37] _Early Victorian Literature_, p. 9.
[38] _English Literature in Account with Religion._
[39] This is fully worked out in Professor Richardson's _American
Literature_, with ample illustration and argument.
[40] _American Men of Letters Series, Washington Irving_, p. 302.
LECTURE V
THE KING JAMES VERSION--ITS INFLUENCE ON ENGLISH AND AMERICAN HISTORY
The King James version of the Bible is only a book. What can a book do in
history? Well, whatever the reason, books have played a large part in the
movements of men, specially of modern men.
They have markedly influenced the opinion of men about the past. It is
commonly said that Hume's _History of England_, defective as it is, has
yet "by its method revolutionized the writing of history," and that is
true. Nearer our own time, Carlyle's _Life of Cromwell_ reversed the
judgment of history on Cromwell, gave all readers of history a new
conception of him and his times and of the movement of which he was the
life. After the Restoration none were so poor as to do Cromwell reverence
until Carlyle's _book_ gave him anew to the world.
There are instances squarely in our own time by which their mighty
influence may be tested. They are of books of almost ephemeral value save
for the student of history. As literature they will be quickly forgotten;
but as _forces_ they must be reckoned with. There is _Uncle Tom's Cabin_.
It would be absurd to say that it brought the American Civil War, or freed
the negroes, or saved the Union. It did none of those great things. Yet it
is not at all absurd to name it among the potent powers in all three. It
is not to our purpose whether it is true or not as a statement of the
whole fact. Doubtless it was not true of the general and common
circumstances of Southern slavery; but everything in it was possible, and
even frequent enough so that it could not be questioned. It pretended no
more. But its influence was simply tremendous. In book form it became
available in 1852, and within three years, 1855, it was common property of
English-speaking people. No other book ever produced so extraordinary an
effect so quickly in the public mind.[41] It held up slavery to judgment.
It crystallized the thoughts of common people. The work of those strenuous
years in the '60's could not have been done without the result of that
book. It made history. Come nearer our own day. We could not be long in
London without feeling the concern of the better people for conditions in
the East End. A new social impulse has seized them. To be sure, it lacks
much yet of success; but more has been done than most people realize. The
new movement, the awakening of that social sense, traces back to the book
of Gen. William Booth, _In Darkest England_ (1890). It has helped to
change the life of a large part of London.
On this side, the new concern for city conditions dates from the book of a
newspaper reporter, Jacob A. Riis, _How the Other Half Lives_. It thrust
the Other Half into such prominence that it has never been possible to
forget it. Marked advance in all American cities, in legislation and life,
goes straight back to it. Name one other book still in the field of social
service, even so unpleasant, so terrible, so obnoxious a book as Upton
Sinclair's _The Jungle_. It started and sustained movements which have
unsettled business and political life ever since it appeared. It made some
conditions vivid, unescapable.
Do not misunderstand the argument. No man can tell what will be said in
the histories a century from now about these lesser books. We can never go
beyond guesses as to the whole cause of any chain of events.[42] As time
passes, incidental elements in the causes gradually sink out of sight and
a few great forces take the whole horizon. Whatever the histories a
century from now say about the relative place of such books as we have
named, it is certain that they have influenced the movements mightily. The
literary histories will say nothing at all about them. They are not great
literature, but they were born of a passion of the times and voiced and
aroused it anew.
When, therefore, it is urged that the English Bible has influenced
history, it is not making an undue claim for it. When it is further urged
that of all books in English literature it has been most influential, it
has most made history, it has most determined great movements, the
argument only claims for it the highest place among books.
And it would not be surprising if it should have such influence. It is the
one great piece of English literature which is universal property. Since
the day it was published it has been kept available for everybody. No
other book has ever had its chance. English-speaking people have always
been essentially religious. They have always had a profound regard for the
terms, the institutions, the purposes of religion. Partly that has been
maintained by the Bible; but the Bible in its turn has been maintained by
it. So it has come about that English-speaking people, though they have
many books, are essentially people of one Book. Wherever they are, the
Bible is. Queen Victoria has it near by when the messenger from the Orient
appears, and lays her hand upon it to say that this is the foundation of
the prosperity of England. But the poor housewife in the cottage, with
only a crust for food, stays her soul with it. The Puritan creeps into
hiding with the Book, while his brother sails away to the new land with
the Book. The settler may have his Shakespeare; he will surely have his
Bible. As the long wagon-train creeps across the plain to seek the Western
shore, there may be no other book in all the train; but the Bible will be
there. Find any settlement of men who speak the English tongue, wherever
they make their home, and the Bible is among them. When did any book have
such a chance to influence men? It is the one undisturbed heritage of all
who speak the English tongue. It binds the daughter and the mother country
together, and gathers into the same bond the scattered remnants of the
English-speaking race the world around. Its language is the one speech
they all understand. Strange it would be if it had not a profound
influence upon history!
Another fact that has helped to give the Bible its great influence is the
power of the preaching it has inspired. The periods of greatest preaching
have always been the periods of freest access to the Bible. No one can
overlook the immense power of the sermons of history. There have been
poor, inept, banal expositors, doubtless; but even they turned men's minds
to the Bible. Reading the Bible makes men thinkers, and so makes preachers
inevitably. Witness the Scotch. James was raised in Scotland and believed
in the power of preaching. At one time he wanted to settle endowments for
the maintenance of preaching under government control. But Archbishop
Whitgift convinced him that much preaching was "an innovation and
dangerous," since it is quite impossible to control a man's mouth once it
is given a public chance. Under Charles I. the sermon was mighty in the
service of the Puritans until it was suppressed or restricted. Then men
became lecturers and expounded the Bible or taught religious truth in
public or private. Rich men engaged private chaplains since public
meetings could not be held. Somehow they taught the Bible still.
Archbishop Laud forbade both. Yet the leaven worked the more for its
restriction. At least one good cook I know says that if you want your
dough to rise and the yeast to work, you must cover it. Laud did not want
it to rise, but he made the mistake of covering it.
There has never been a book which has provoked such incessant preaching
and discussion as has the Bible. The believers in the Koran teach it as it
is, word for word. Believers in the Bible have never stopped with that.
They have always tried to come together and hear it expounded. Such
gatherings and such constant pressure of the Book on groups of hearers
would inevitably give the Bible great influence. When it is remembered
that in America alone there are each week approximately four hundred
thousand gatherings of people which have for their avowed purpose
instruction or inspiration in religion, and that the instruction and
inspiration are professedly and openly drawn from the Bible, that more
than three hundred thousand sermons are preached every week from it and
passages of it read in all the gatherings, it appears that the Bible had
and still has such a chance to influence life as no other book has had.
President Schurman traces a large part of our own stronger American life
to the educative power of our Sundays. But central in the education of
those days is now, and has been from the first of our national history,
the English Bible.
The influence of the Bible comes also from the fact that it makes its
chief appeal to the deeper elements in life. "Human history in its real
character is not an account of kings and of wars; it is the unfolding of
the moral, the political, the artistic, the social, and the spiritual
progress of the human family. The time will yet come when the names of
dynasties and of battles shall not form the titles of its chapters. The
truths revealed in the Bible have been the touchstone which has tried
men's spirits."[43]
Those words go to the heart of the fact. The influence of the English
Bible on English-speaking history for the last three hundred years is only
the influence of its fundamental truths. It has moved with tremendous
impact on the wills of men. It has made the great human ideals clear and
definite; it has made them beautiful and attractive; but that has not been
enough. It has reached also the springs of action. It has given men a
sense of need and also a sense of strength, a sense of outrage and a sense
of power to correct the wrong. There it has differed from most books.
Frederick Robertson said that he read only books with iron in them, and,
as he read, their atoms of iron entered the blood, and it ran more red for
them.
There is iron in this Book, and it has entered the blood of the human
race. Where it has entered most freely, the red has deepened; and nowhere
has it deepened more than in our English-speaking races. The iron of our
blood is from this King James version.
Bismarck explained the victories of the Germans over the French by the
fact that from childhood the Germans had been trained in the sense of
duty, as the French had not been trained, and as soldiers had learned to
feel that nothing could escape the Eye which ever watched their course.
They learned that, Bismarck said, from the religion which they had been
taught. There is no mistaking the power of religion in rousing and
sharpening the sense of duty. Webster spoke for the English-speaking
races, and found his phrases in the Bible, when he said that this sense
"pursues us ever. It is omnipresent like the Deity. If we take to
ourselves the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the
sea, duty performed or duty violated is still with us for our happiness or
our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in
the light our obligations are yet with us. We cannot escape from their
power or fly from their presence." It is religion which makes that sense
of duty keen; and, whatever religion has done among English-speaking
races, the English Bible has done, for it has been the text-book and the
final authority of those races in the moving things of their faith.
It would be easiest in making the argument to single out here and there
the striking events in which the Bible has figured and let them stand for
the whole. There are many such events, and they are attractive.
We can imagine ourselves standing on the shore at Dover in 1660, fifty
years after the version was issued, waiting with the crowd to see the
banished King return. The civil war is over, the protectorate under
Cromwell is past. Charles II., thick-lipped, sensuous, "seeming to belong
rather to southern Europe than to Puritan England," is about to land from
France, whence the people, wearied with Puritan excesses, have called him
back. There is a great crowd, but they do not cheer wildly. There is
something serious on hand. They mean to welcome the King; but it is on
condition. Their first act is when the Mayor of Dover places in his hands
a copy of the English Bible, which the King declares he loves above all
things in the world. It proves only a sorry jest; but the English people
think it is meant for truth, and they go to their homes rejoicing. They
rejoiced too soon, for this is that utterly faithless king for whom his
witty courtier proposed an epitaph:
"Here lies our sovereign lord, the king,
Whose word no man relies on;
Who never said a foolish thing,
And never did a wise one."[44]
As at other times, the King was only talking with no meaning; but the
people did not know him yet. They had made their Bible the great test of
their liberties: will a king stand by that or will he not? If he will not,
let him remember Charles the First! And from that day no English king, no
American leader, has ever successfully restricted English-speaking people
from free access to their great Book. It has become a banner of their
liberties. The child was wiser than he knew when he was asked what lesson
we may learn from Charles I., and replied that we may learn that a man
should not lose his head in times of excitement. Charles lost his head
long before he laid it on the block.
Besides the scene at Dover, we may watch that great emigration of the
Scotch-Irish from Ulster, beginning in 1689, seventy years after the
Puritan exodus and eighty years after the version was issued, which
peopled the backwoods of America with a choice, strong population. They
were only following the right to worship freely, the right to their Bible
without chains on its lids or on the lips of its preachers. They were
making no protest against Romanism nor against Anglicanism in themselves.
They only claimed the right to worship as they would. Under William and
Mary, after James II. had fled to France, toleration became the law in
England; but when Ireland was reconquered by William's generals, the act
of toleration was not extended to it. Baptists, Presbyterians, all except
the small Anglican Church, were put under the ban and forbidden to
worship. But the Bible had made submission impossible, and there came
about that great exodus to the new land which has so blessed it.
There are other signal events which might be observed. But all the while
there would be danger of magnifying the importance of events which seem to
prove the point. The view needs to be a more general one instead. The
period is not long--three hundred years at the most--though it has a
background of all English history. We have already seen how from the first
there have been determined efforts to make the Bible common to the people;
yet, of course, the influence of our version can appear only in these
three hundred years since it was issued. That short period has not only
been interesting almost to the point of excitement in English life, but it
covers virtually all American life. Take, therefore, the broader view of
the influence of the English Bible on history, apart from these striking
events.
It is to be assumed at once that much of its influence is indirect.
Indeed, its chief influence must be through men who prove to be leaders
and through that public sentiment without which leaders are powerless. If
leaders live by it and stand or fall by its teaching, then their work is
its work. If they find a public sentiment issuing from it which gives them
power, a sentiment which crystallizes around them when they appear,
because it is of kindred spirit with themselves, then the power of that
sentiment is the power of the Bible. The influence of _Pilgrim's Progress_
or _The Saint's Rest_ is the influence of Bunyan and Baxter; but back of
them is the Bible. In language, in idea, in spirit, they were only making
the Bible a common Book to their readers. Their value for life and history
is the Bible's value for life and history.
The power of great souls is frequently and easily underestimated.
Scientific study has tended to that by magnifying visible conditions and
by trying to calculate the force of laws which are in plain sight.
Buckle's theory of civilization has influenced our times greatly. It
explains national character as the outcome of natural conditions, and lays
such stress on circumstances as left it possible for Buckle to declare
that history and biography are in different spheres. It is still true,
however, that most history turns on biography. Great souls have been the
chief factors in great movements. Whether the movement could have occurred
without them will never be possible to decide, if it should be disputed.
In a chemical laboratory the essential factors of any phenomenon can be
determined by the process of elimination. All the elements which preceded
it except one can be introduced; if the result is the same as in its
presence, manifestly it is not essential. So the experiment can go on
until the result becomes different, when it is evident that the last
omitted element is an essential one. But no such process is possible in
great historical movements. The only course open to us is to consider
carefully the elements which do appear.
Take three great movements which are easiest to follow in these three
centuries. Whether the spiritual independence of England would have been
secured without the Quakers may be debated; but this fact can hardly be
debated: certainly it was not so secured; whether or not the Quakers could
have been without George Fox, certainly they did not occur without him.
Take the second: whether or not some other movement could have done what
Puritanism did is hardly a question for history; Puritanism actually did
the work for England and America which gave both their strongest
qualities. There is no testing the period to see whether Puritanism could
be left out. There it stands as a powerful factor, and no analysis of the
history can possibly omit it. Or the third: it is not a question for a
historian whether English history could have been the same without
Methodism and whether Methodism could have been at all without the
Wesleys; certainly nothing took its place, nor did any one else stand at
the head of the movement.
Here are these three great movements, not to seek others. All of them have
had tremendous influence in the religious and political history of both
the nations where they have moved most freely. Each of them is a direct
and undisputed result of the influence of the Bible. Much has already been
said of the Puritans in England, and there will be occasion to see what
was their influence in America. But think for a moment of the Quakers.
James Freeman Clark calls them the English mystics; certainly they were
more than that.[45] George Fox had little learning but the Bible; that he
knew well. He first came to himself out in the fields alone with the
Bible. He was not stirred to the origin of the movement nor to his
greatest activity by experiences he had in public places. He came to those
public places profoundly affected by his familiarity with the English
Bible. He came at a time when his protest was needed, a protest against
formalism, against mere outward conformity. A thousand years before,
Mohammedanism had really saved the Christian faith by its protest, violent
and merciless, against its errors, challenging it to purity in faith and
life. Now Fox and the Quakers saved church life by protest against church
life. The Bible was still the law, but not the Bible which you read for
me, but that which you read for you and I for me, each of us guided by an
inner light. The Quaker movement was a distinct protest against church
formalism in the interests of freedom of the Bible.
That Quaker influence was far stronger in America than it ever proved to
be in England. George Fox himself visited the colonies and extended its
influence. Three great effects are easily traceable. The very presence of
the Quakers in the New England colonies, notably in Massachusetts, and the
persecutions which they endured, did more to purify the Puritans than any
other one influence. One is only loyal to the Puritan character and
teaching in declaring that in the manner of the Puritans toward the
Quakers they were wrong; they were wrong because they were untrue to their
own belief, untrue to their own Bibles, and when the more thoughtful among
them found that they were taking the attitude toward the Quakers which
they had resented toward themselves, remembering that the Quakers were
drawing their teaching from the same Bible as themselves, they were
naturally checked. And, while the Quakers in New England suffered greatly,
their suffering proved the purification of the Puritans. It accented and
so it removed the narrowness of Puritan practice. Further, the Quaker
movement gave to American history William Penn and the whole constitution
of Pennsylvania. It was there that a state first lived by the principle
which William Penn pronounced: "Any government is free where the people
are a party to the laws enacted." So it came about that Independence Hall
is on Quaker soil. The Declaration of Independence appeared there, and not
on Puritan soil. It may be there was more freedom of thought in
Pennsylvania. It may be explained on purely geographical ground,
Philadelphia being the most convenient center for the colonies. But it
remains significant that not on Cavalier soil in Virginia, not on Dutch
soil in New York, not on Puritan soil in Boston, but on Quaker soil in
Philadelphia the movement for national independence crystallized around a
general principle that "any government is free where the people are a
party to the laws enacted," but that no government is free whose people
have not a voice. That is not minimizing the power of Puritanism, nor
forgetting Fanueil Hall and the Tea Party. It only accents what should be
familiar: that Puritanism drew into itself more of the fighting element of
Scripture, while the Quaker movement drew into itself more of the uniting,
pacifying element of Scripture. The third effect of the Quaker movement is
John Greenleaf Whittier, with his gentle but never weak demand that
national freedom should not mean independence of other people alone, but
the independence of all people within the nation. So that while the Quaker
spirit helped the colonies to break loose from foreign control and become
a nation, it helped the nation in turn to break loose from internal
shackles. The nation stood free within itself as well as free from others.
Yet the Quaker movement--and this is the argument--is itself the result of
the English Bible, and the Quaker influence is the influence of the
English Bible on history.