underlying unity of character, which makes it in a very real way a single book.

This same essential unity of quality is even more palpable in the style, which in its directness and its simple nobility is the one standard which we have in English to control the development of our language. The phrases from the Bible which have grown into our everyday speech spring impartially from the Old and New Testaments: we use "the son of his old age," or "the valley of the shadow of death," or "the pure in spirit," or "lilies of the field," without thinking whether they come from one part of the book or the other. This unity of style is, as we shall see, largely due to the fact that the whole book was translated at the same period into a language of unsurpassed and unfaded vigor, which now has enough tinge of the archaic to give it a color of its own. It was Tindale's great achievement that once for all he fixed the language of the whole Bible: and under the anxious and inspired care of the revisers who followed in his steps the style has been brought to a point of simplicity and dignity, of strong feeling expressed by the rich music of the prose, of stateliness and directness, which sets it apart from the style of any other book in the language.

Thus whether we consider the substance or the

style of the Bible, we only reinforce our original impression that in English literature it is a single book. If we were studying Hebrew literature or New Testament literature we should of necessity break it up and should find the force of the common saying that the Bible is a "library of books"; but for our present purpose it is a single book in as real a sense, though in a different one, as that in which the works of Shakspere constitute a single book. In a volume of his works it is a far cry from the euphuistic ingenuities of Love's Labour's Lost or the rant and bombast of some parts of the early chronicle histories or the passionate romance of Romeo and Juliet to the intense complication of thought in Hamlet or the great-hearted power of Antony and Cleopatra, and from them to the placid and autumnal charm of The Tempest. But for all these differences they have a common underlying character; and elusive though it may be, we recog nize that Shakspere's personality hides behind them all. So in quite another way with the English Bible: though there can be no question here of personality, yet the unity of character is indisputable; for the religion of which it is the written revelation is as distinctly individual as is the character which gives consistency to the words and deeds of a man. At the end of our study I shall recur

to this point, and after the analysis and discussion of distinctions, try to bring my readers back to this natural attitude towards the Bible as a whole and single book.

In the meantime, in the hope of enriching that impression by pointing out the immense variety of the different parts which blend into the impression of the whole, I shall dwell on the diversity of the sources from which they spring, both in substance and in time. Those of the Old Testament cover in time certainly more than a thousand years. The earliest materials go back to a period when the people of Israel were barely emerging from the wanderings of a nomadic life. These stories and songs and laws gradually coalesced in the hands of a long series of compilers and writers into something like connected histories; then in the hands of successive schools of prophets and priests, each with a clearer and higher perception of the true nature of Jehovah and his relations to his chosen people, these histories were in some cases changed in purpose and contents, and expanded by additions, in part of prophetic exhortation, in part of legal and liturgical prescriptions, until in the narrow and bitter times of the Persian sovereignty they came into their present form. The books of poetry, though each incorporates material from earlier times, came to be the expression of the

thought and aspirations of the Jews of this same late period, a period when they were struggling for their existence both as a nation and as a church with a noble and inextinguishable faith. The prophecy, the key to the whole literature, first taking written form with Amos and Hosea and Isaiah, came to its height with them; and then gradually losing its power, after the times of the Captivity it dried up or ran off into the inspired dreams of the apocalyptic literature, which continued on far beyond the apostolic age of the New Testament. Then in the New

Testament, we come to books which were written in a modern and Western language, when the Roman empire held undisputed sway over the world. Thus in point of time the work that we shall be studying ranges in origin from some time before 1200 B.C. to at least as late as the end of the first century A.D.

In material there is a corresponding variety. There are scraps of folk-songs of war and victory, early legends and myths, histories based on contemporary records and full of the vigor of a most vigorous time, great bodies of laws which reflect important changes in civilization, highly developed schemes of liturgy and ecclesiastical law, collections of proverbs so pithy and closely wrought that they still hold their truth, psalms of pious and connected medita

tion or of jubilant ejaculations of faith, the soaring messages of the prophecy, the mystical visions of the apocalypse, the simple, everlasting stories and teachings of the gospels, the fiery and soaring arguments of St. Paul.

In the Old Testament all this material is Oriental: it springs from the same civilization as the Arabian Nights. But it has preserved for us the history, the poetry, the wisdom, the religious ideals and national hopes of a people whose individuality and tenacity of thought are perhaps the strongest known in history. The poetry is marked by a singular concreteness and objectivity both of idea and of idiom, and by a freedom of form otherwise unknown in English. The books of wisdom are shrewd or at times soaring, but they never reason in the modern sense of the word. The religious ideas develop without any break which could make the pious Jew of the fourth century B.C. feel himself cut loose from ancestors of the tenth or fifteenth century B.C. whose religion and worship had close kinship to those of other desert tribes.

In the New Testament side by side with the Oriental simplicity of the first three gospels and of some of the later books there is a new element, and an approach to modern ways of thought in the fourth gospel, in the epistles of St. Paul, and in Hebrews. In