has said, "a problem how, two languages being given, the nearest approximation may be made in the second to the expression of ideas already conveyed through the medium of the first. The problem almost starts with the assumption that something must be sacrificed, and the chief question is, what is the least sacrifice?"* The writer of a translation for the people cannot hesitate long for an answer. He must devote a holocaust of particles and tenses and nice shades of meaning, if he intends his work to go out of the scholar's study and be thumbed by the daily reading of common men. His first duty is towards his own language, but in fulfilling it he really pays the highest honour to his author's. He has to represent his author's thought as clearly and intelligibly as the author would have done in the translator's language. If he makes a psalm or a prophecy appear smoother to his reader than it appeared to himself as a student, it is because he knows that there was a time when psalmist and prophet sounded as smoothly to the Hebrew ear, as now, thanks to their translator, they read to the English eye. He knows that psalm and prophecy are not only sacred, but classical; beneath a theology he has learned to find a literature.

Thus, according to the simile of Tickell, a translation is like the unrolling of embroidery, which reveals its hidden beauties; and for the revelation of the Hebrew beauties, no language is so well adapted as the English. No language accommodates itself so well to the simple naïve constructions of the Hebrew. No language, unless to some extent the Italian, possesses that majestic rhythmical cadence which answers so well to the rhythmical system of the Hebrew accents. No language has enshrined in the popular Bible such a store of dignified and yet elegant words to express the tenderest emotions of the kindled heart.

The English translator, however, needs to be continually on his guard against the abuse of these advantages. There is a large excess of Hebraism in the Authorized Version, which drew forth strong words of blame from Selden in his "Table Talk." He says,

"There is no book so translated as the Bible for the purpose. If I translate a French book into English, I turn it into English phrase, not into French English. Il fait froid,' I say, 'tis cold, not it makes cold; but the Bible is rather translated into English words than into English phrase. The Hebraisms are kept, and the phrase of that language is kept. As for example" [here he quotes from memory]. "This is well enough so long as scholars have to do with it; but when it comes among the common people, Lord! what gear do they make of it!"+

Perhaps the historian of literature mitigating this rather harsh verdict.

might find some ground for
Of those two counter move-

"The Church of the Fathers," Preface, p. vi.
This quotation is often made, but generally mutilated.

ments, the Latinizing one of Milton and the Hebraizing one of the translators, the latter has turned out incalculably the more fruitful. Many Hebraisms, unknown in the language before, became household words through the English Bible.* But from a critical point of view, Selden's judgment is fully justified. The only excuse which can be made for the translators lies in the fact that they were not seldom profoundly ignorant what the Hebraisms meant.

The same fault in a still higher degree is chargeable upon the Vulgate; and St. Augustine relates a remarkable story in point. "He was preaching on a certain occasion on Matt. xi. 25, which the vulgar Latin renders, 'I confess to thee, O Father,' &c., and he had no sooner read the first words of his text, than his hearers fell a beating of their breasts, according to the custom of those that confessed their sins in his time; which gave him occasion to blame them for having taken too much notice of the words, without considering their meaning; telling them they were words of thanksgiving in this place, being expressed by our Blessed Saviour, who had never sinned, and consequently had no need of confession."+

Instances, not indeed so flagrant, but still to be deplored, may easily be cited from the Authorized Version. Few people are aware how commonly they occur, and how far they interfere with the due apprehension of the meaning. The poetical books are full of them.

Mistakes of this and every other kind may be prevented by bearing in mind the true relation of the modern translator to the original text. That relation is one of fidelity not to the parts so much as to the whole, not to the letter so much as to the spirit. Why have our revisers so conspicuously failed in the poetical books? Because they have revised them in parts instead of revising them as wholes. If, for instance, instead of revising a psalm verse by verse, they had set themselves first of all to catch the thread which connects the ideas, and then to ingraft that upon the Authorized Version, taking care to express the symmetry of the thoughts by the symmetry of the form, they would have produced a rendering faulty perhaps in details, but yet rhythmical, uniform, and intelligible.

If, still further, they had extended their criticism from the whole to the parts, resting the eye alternately on the Hebrew and the old English, altering where alteration was needed, but compelling their alterations to assume a concordant, rhythmical form, they would have succeeded in producing a translation as near as our age can hope to

See the Spectator, No. 405, and compare Renan, Job, Préface, p. ii., "La langue française est puritaine; on ne fait pas de conditions avec elle.”

"An Essay for a New Translation, &c. By H. R. [Hugh Ross], a Minister of the Church of England," p. 45. This book is said to be really a translation from the French of Le Cène.

see to that with which the great translators, if they had possessed our means, would have been eager to endow us.

Perhaps some one may object that such a description implies qualities which cannot be found united in the same person. There is a very general prejudice against Hebrew scholars as dry, tasteless, hypercritical, and it must be admitted that this has too often been justified by facts. But now, when the breath of the modern renaissance, warm with sentiment and clear with science, has vivified even the dull domain of Hebrew grammar and lexicography, there must be something very stony in the minds of English scholars if they should still fail to exhibit traces of its influence. Renan and Bunsen, whatever be their failings, are Hebraists of equal taste and learning: why should our own nation, foremost even now in taste and scholarship, be without such Hebraists of her own?*

The future is in our own hands, and much of its weal or woe depends on the way in which we handle our English Bible. If we handle it wisely and well, the most happy effects will be felt in all the regions of our spiritual life. Cries of failure and despondency will cease to be heard around us. Men will cease to complain of our sermons for their emptiness, their dulness, and want of reality. They will cease to complain of our people for their indifference and hostility to religious truth. They will cease to complain of our critics for their intemperate attacks on our most sacred beliefs. But attacks will always be dangerous, and defences will always be feeble, and sermons will always be dull, and hearers will always be unimpressed, until we have before us a translation of our sacred books, so clear, distinct, intelligible, that "he may run who reads it."

T. K. CHEYNE.

The late honoured John Keble, in his metrical version of the Psalms, has shown both taste and scholarship, but he fails entirely to give an idea of the Psalms as wholes. Still, for realizing the deep beauty of expression in them, the English reader can never possess a greater treasure than this almost forgotten book.

CHURCH GOVERNMENT IN THE COLONIES:

A REPLY.

THE

HE article on Church Government in the Colonies, which appeared in the February number of this Review, has naturally excited much attention amongst those who are interested in the affairs of the Colonial Church. It expounds, elaborately and ably, views of the Church in the British Empire, which, to those who do not distinguish between spiritual authority and the force of law, and are unwilling or unable to regard the Church of England separate from its accidents as united with the State, may seem almost incontrovertible. And yet the object of the article is far from being clear. The reviewer pronounces indeed a vehement and indiscriminating condemnation on the proceedings of the Bishop of Capetown and his advisers, and so far his purpose is sufficiently apparent. There are also ingenious distinctions drawn in the article between the different colonial churches, the practical value of which distinctions, however, is not very obvious, whilst the descriptions of the different phases of colonial church life require, if I may judge from my own experience, some important corrections. The arguments of the writer manifest high regard for the Royal Supremacy in church matters beyond the limits of law, and confidence in the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, and in lawyers generally rather than theologians. It is nevertheless very difficult to lay hold of the exact end at which he is aiming. He proposes to point out "the best means open to us for setting right the difficulties which have arisen." But beyond the

general principle, that in all causes, that is, in all questions of law, -there should be an appeal to the Crown, which we all admit is the right, not merely of every Churchman, but of every British subject, I can find nothing substantial in the argument. The writer does not distinguish, as it seems to me, between judgments in spiritual causes, which proceed from the Sovereign as Supreme Governor of the United Church of England and Ireland, and those judgments as to temporalities by Courts of Law, like that in the case of Mr. Long, which may indirectly involve questions as to church discipline and doctrine, whether the parties are Roman Catholics or members of the English communion, but which nevertheless leave the colonial churches independent, as other religious communities there are, of the kind of control which he desires for them. If this distinction be observed, there is little in his proposals that has not been already said, even before the judgment in the Colenso case, by those of us on whom these questions have been forced by painful experience of the difficulties of our position, but who arrive at very different conclusions from those to which his arguments point. The article may possibly be intended to suggest some course which does not appear on the surface, but instead of supplying any definite proposition for setting right our difficulties, it leaves matters, in my judgment, just as they are, and I did not consider that it required any reply from those of us who dissent from many of its principles, and who are deeply and personally interested in a satisfactory solution of the problems with which it professes to deal. It is only at the request of those to whose judgment I defer, who think the article calculated to produce impressions which may act as an impediment to any such solution, that I make the following remarks on some of its statements.

In the first place, the vehement denunciations by the writer of the Bishop of Capetown, in which he confounds together the Bishop's proceedings in the Long case and in that of Bishop Colenso, are hardly written in the spirit of an impartial and dispassionate inquirer into important constitutional principles of church government. He says:

"We can only wonder at the rashness and wilfulness which prompted the attempt to enforce, by virtue of these instruments, an episcopal autocracy to which nothing similar has been seen in England since the days of the Court of High Commission. Those who have counselled these proceedings are themselves alone responsible for the disastrous issue of their attempt. Nor can we consider that the issue has been other than disastrous. It is said, indeed, that it is best to know at once where we stand; but this was known sufficiently before. What has been elicited by these attempts is the unfortunate spectacle of a bishop of the Church of England asserting a despotic power for which he had no grounds; appealing to the most solemn sanctions for his support in a manner which, to bystanders, could hardly appear other than ridiculous; scattering accusations of heresy and schism broadcast