of sources from which it drew. Beginning with the devoted and inspired labors of Tindale, through him it drew on the translations of Jerome, of Erasmus, of Luther, and through Coverdale and his successors, it drew on the Swiss-German version of Zürich, on the Latin translations of Pagninus, of Münster, of Tremellius, of Leo Juda, of Castalio, and of Theodore Beza, and on the French translations of Lefèvre and Olivetan, and of the "venerable company of pastors at Geneva," besides occasional phrases from new translations into Spanish and Italian. It gathered its materials wherever they could be found, adopting here a word and there a phrase in order to arrive at the closest and most expressive English within their power. Nothing is more remarkable in the history of our English Bible than this large-minded and eager search, to which I shall presently recur, through all the possible sources for anything that would help towards the best translation into English; and we may well suppose that this careful scrutiny of so large a variety of sources, which is not paralleled in the history of any other Bible, did much to give its permanence to the work of the translators.

CHAPTER IX

THE KING JAMES BIBLE

I

In a final summing up of the literary characteristics of the Authorised Version there are two aspects in which it must be considered. In the first place we must make some estimate of it as a translation and consider how far the characteristics of the original languages still color the English work, and what skill the translators have showed in rendering the idiom of one language into that of another. In the second place we must try to define the characteristics of the English Bible as a work in English literature apart from its merits or shortcomings as a translation.

Looking at it first as a translation, one must begin by recognising that there are two elements which an adequate translation must render into the new language, on the one hand the literal meanings of the words, their exact denotation, on the other hand, the feeling and emotion which suffuses the single words and gives them power. To render the former is a question in part of proper equipment in dictionaries

and grammars, in part of patient and enlightened industry in the use of such apparatus. To render the spirit, which is the life, on the other hand, is a question of finding words with apt connotations, associations, and implications, and of so putting them together as to add the expressiveness of sound to the style. For the scholarship and the apparatus' of scholarship England in the sixteenth century was well equipped for the time. All manuscripts of the Hebrew are practically identical, and already by the sixteenth century the dictionaries and grammars were so good that Tindale's translation of the clearer parts of the Old Testament stands with little change to-day. The great advance in scholarship has made possible larger improvements in the other books where the original text is more obscure. In the case of the New Testament the foundation work had been laid by Erasmus, and his work was continued by scholars like Robert Stephens and Beza. The science of criticism, however, was not to be born till the beginning of the eighteenth century, and there were many questions of text and preferable readings which it was impossible for the best scholars of the sixteenth century to solve. Hence, as the Revised Version makes clear, in details the Authorised Version needed correction.

On the other hand the infusing of the words of

the translation with the spirit, which gave it its place as the crowning monument of English literature, could be better accomplished in the sixteenth century than at any time before or since in English history. In the first place the state of the language was at its very best for the purpose. I have pointed out in the chapter on poetry that the rich coloring of the Old Testament is largely derived from the fact that the Hebrew had no words which had not a physical signification, and that they were thus of necessity clothed with a strength of feeling which can never be attained by abstract words. The English of the sixteenth century was more fit to reproduce this character of the Hebrew than it has ever been again. Since that time English has been enriched chiefly by the addition of abstract and general words, mostly from the Latin and Greek, to express the constantly enlarging range of scientific and philosophical thought; and we write naturally and necessarily nowadays in abstract terms from which the figurative force has long since faded out. No one who has read in the writings of the sixteenth century can fail to be struck by the picturesqueness which comes from a figurativeness of language unlike anything in our language to-day. Even in the statute books one finds such lively and figurative language as, "But their vicious living shamelessly increaseth and

augmenteth, and by a cursed custom so rooted and infected that a great multitude of the religious persons in such small houses do rather choose to rove abroad in apostasy than to conform themselves to the true religion "; 1 or in another statute: "Without providing wherefore too great a scope of unreasonable liberty should be given to all cankered and traitorous hearts, willers, and workers of the same." If such language gives color to the legal phraseology of the statute book, one is not surprised to find the language of ordinary books full of vivid and vigorous figures of speech. Tindale himself in his Epistle to the Reader promises a revision in these words, “and will endeavor ourselves as it were to seethe it better and to make it more apt for the weak stomachs "; and in another place he speaks of "sucking out the sweet pith of the Scriptures." In the latter case we to-day should probably have written "extract the essence"; and thereby with what is to us the quaintness we should have lost also the eagerness and delight which color Tindale's words with their halo of feeling. The language of this sixteenth century was lacking in many of our commonest general words, and as a result men used figures of speech more naturally. Even when we take into account the love of picturesque phrases which effervesced into the affec226 Henry VIII, c. 13.

127 Henry VIII, c. 28.