King James’ Bible.
There was discussion of this; my Lord Bancroft, Bishop of London, venturing the sage remark that if every man’s humor should be followed, there would be no end of translating. In the course of the talk we may well believe that King James nodded approval of anything that would flatter his kingly vanities, and shook his big unkempt head at what would make call for a loosening of his purse-strings. But out of this slumberous conference, and out of these initial steps, did come the scriptural revision; and did come that noble monument of the English language, and of the Christian faith, sometimes called “King James’ Bible,” though—for anything that the old gentleman had to do vitally or specifically with the revision—it might as well have been called the Bible of King James’ tailor, or the Bible of King James’ cat.
It must be said, however, for the King, that he did press for a prompt completion of the work, and that “it should be done by the best learned in both universities.” Indeed, if the final dedication of the translators to the “most High, and Mighty Prince James” (which many a New England boy of fifty years ago wrestled with in the weary lapses of too long a sermon) were to be taken in its literal significance, the obligations to him were immense; after thanking him as “principal mover and author of the work,” the dedication exuberantly declares that “the hearts of all your loyal and religious people are so bound and firmly knit unto you, that your very name is precious among them: Their eye doth behold you with comfort, and they bless you in their hearts, as that sanctified person, who, under God, is the immediate author of their true Happiness.” The King’s great reverence for the Scriptures is abundantly evidenced by that little tractate of his—the Basilikon Doron—not written for publication (though surreptitiously laid hold of by the book-makers) but intended for the private guidance of his eldest son, Prince Henry, in that time heir to the throne. The little book shows large theologic discretions; and—saving some scornings of the “vaine, Pharisaicall Puritaines”—is written in a spirit which might be safely commended to later British Princes.
“When yee reade the Scripture [says the King] reade it with a sanctified and chast hart; admire reverentlie such obscure places as ye understand not, blaming only your own capacitie; reade with delight the plaine places, and study carefully to understand those that are somewhat difficile: preasse to be a good textuare; for the Scripture is ever the best interpreter of itselfe.”
Some forty odd competent men were set out from the universities and elsewheres for the work of the Bible revision. Yet they saw none of King James’ money, none from the royal exchequer; which indeed from the King’s disorderly extravagances, that helped nobody, was always lamentably low. The revisers got their rations, when they came together in conference, in Commons Hall, or where and when they could; and only at the last did some few of them who were engaged in the final work of proof-reading, get a stipend of some thirty shillings a week from that fraternity of book-makers who were concerned with the printing and selling of the new Bible.
When the business of revision actually commenced it is hard to determine accurately; but it was not till the year 1611—eight years after the Hampton Conference—that an edition was published by printer Barker (who, or whose company, was very zealous about the matter, it being a fat job for him) and so presently, under name of King James’ version “appointed (by assemblage of Bishops) to be read in churches,” it came to be the great Bible of the English-speaking world—then, and thence-forward. And now, who were the forty men who dealt so wisely and sparingly with the old translators; who came to their offices of revision with so tender a reverence, and who put such nervous, masculine, clear-cut English into their own emendations of this book as to leave it a monument of Literature? Their names are all of record: and yet if I were to print them, the average reader would not recognize, I think, a single one out of the twoscore.[9] You would not find Bacon’s name, who, not far from this time was writing some of his noblest essays, and also writing (on the King’s suggestion) about preaching and Church management. You would not find the name of William Camden, who was then at the mellow age of sixty, and of a rare reputation for learning and for dignity of character. You would not find the name of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, who though writing much of religious intention, was deistically inclined; nor of Robert Burton, churchman, and author of that famous book The Anatomy of Melancholy—then in his early prime; nor of Sir Walter Raleigh, nor of Sir Thomas Overbury—both now at the date of their best powers; nor yet would one find mention of John Donne,[10] though he came to be Dean of St. Paul’s and wrote poems the reader may—and ought to know; nor, yet again, is there any hearing of Sir John Davies, who had commended himself specially to King James, and who had written poetically and reverently on the Immortality of the Soul[11] in strains that warrant our citing a few quatrains:—
“At first, her mother Earth she holdeth dear,
And doth embrace the world and worldly things:
She flies close by the ground, and hovers here,
And mounts not up with her celestial wings.
“Yet under heaven she cannot light on aught
That with her heavenly nature doth agree;
She cannot rest, she cannot fix her thought,
She cannot in this world contented be:
“For who, did ever yet, in honor, wealth,
Or pleasure of the sense, contentment find?
Who ever ceased to wish, when he had health?
Or, having wisdom, was not vexed in mind?
“Then, as a bee which among weeds doth fall,
Which seem sweet flowers, with lustre fresh and gay;
She lights on that and this, and tasteth all,
But, pleased with none, doth rise and soar away!”
This is a long aside; but it gives us good breath to go back to our translators, who if not known to the general reader, were educators or churchmen of rank; men of trained minds who put system and conscience and scholarship into their work. And their success in it, from a literary aspect only, shows how interfused in all cultivated minds of that day was a keen apprehension and warm appreciation of the prodigious range, and the structural niceties, and rhythmic forces of that now well-compacted English language which Chaucer and Spenser and Shakespeare, each in his turn, had published to the world, with brilliant illustration.
And will this old Bible of King James’ version continue to be held in highest reverence? Speaking from a literary point of view—which is our stand-point to-day—there can be no doubt that it will; nor is there good reason to believe that—on literary lines—any other will ever supplant it. There may be versions that will be truer to the Greek; there may be versions that will be far truer to the Hebrew; there may be versions that will mend its science—that will mend its archæology—that will mend its history; but never one, I think, which, as a whole, will greatly mend that orderly and musical and forceful flow of language springing from early English sources, chastened by Elizabethan culture and flowing out—freighted with Christian doctrine—over all lands where Saxon speech is uttered. Nor in saying this, do I yield a jot to any one—in respect for that modern scholarship which has shown bad renderings from the Greek, and possibly far worse ones from the Hebrew. No one—it is reasonably to be presumed—can safely interpret doctrines of the Bible without the aid of this scholarship and of the “higher criticism;” and no one will be henceforth fully trusted in such interpretation who is ignorant of, or who scorns the recent revisions.
And yet the old book, by reason of its strong, sweet, literary quality, will keep its hold in most hearts and most minds. Prove to the utmost that the Doxology,[12] at the end of the Lord’s Prayer, is an interpolation—that it is nowhere in the earlier Greek texts (and I believe it is abundantly proven), and yet hundreds, and thousands, and tens of thousands who use that invocation, will keep on saying, in the rhythmic gush of praise, which is due maybe to some old worthy of the times of the Henrys (perhaps Tyndale himself)—“For thine is the Kingdom, and the Power, and the Glory, for ever and ever, Amen!”
And so with respect to that splendid Hebraic poem of Job, or that mooted book of Ecclesiastes; no matter what critical scholarship may do in amplification or curtailment, it can never safely or surely refine away the marvellous graces of their strong, old English current—burdened with tender memories—murmurous with hopes drifting toward days to come—“or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the cistern.”
The scientists may demonstrate that this ancient oak—whose cooling shadows have for so many ages given comfort and delight—is overgrown, unshapely, with needless nodules, and corky rind, and splotches of moss, and seams that show stress of gone-by belaboring tempests; they may make it clear that these things are needless for its support—that they cover and cloak its normal organic structure; but who shall hew them clean away, and yet leave in fulness of stature and of sheltering power the majestic growth we venerate? I know the reader may say that this is a sentimental view; so it is; but science cannot measure the highest beauty of a poem; and with whose, or what fine scales shall we weigh the sanctities of religious awe?
It must be understood, however, that the charms of the “King James’ Version” do not lie altogether in Elizabethan beauties of phrase, or in Jacobean felicities; there are quaint archaisms in it which we are sure have brought their pleasant reverberations of lingual sound all the way down from the days of Coverdale, of Tyndale, and of Wyclif.
A few facts about the printing and publishing of the early English Bibles it may be well to call to mind. In a previous chapter I spoke of the fatherly edicts against Bible-reading and Bible-owning in the time of Henry VIII.; but the reign of his son, Edward VI., was a golden epoch for the Bible printers. During the six years when this boy-king held the throne, fifty editions—principally Coverdale’s and Tyndale’s versions—were issued, and no less than fifty-seven printers were engaged in their manufacture.
Queen Mary made difficulties again, of which a familiar and brilliant illustration may be found in that old New England Primer which sets forth in ghastly wood-cut “the burning of Mr. John Rogers at the Stake, in Smithfield.” Elizabeth was coy; she set a great many prison-doors open; and when a courtier said, “May it please your Majesty, there be sundry other prisoners held in durance, and it would much comfort God’s people that they be set free.” She asked, “Whom?” And the good Protestant said, “Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.” But she—young as she was—showed her monarch habit. “Let us first find,” said she, “if they wish enlargement.”
But she had accepted the gift of a Bible on first passing through Cheapside—had pressed it to her bosom in sight of the street people, and said she should “oft read that holy book”—which was easy to say, and becoming.
In the early days of her reign the Genevan Bible, always a popular one in England, was completed, and printed mostly in Geneva; but a privilege for printing it in England was assigned to John Bodley—that John Bodley whose more eminent son, Sir Thomas, afterward founded and endowed the well-known Bodleian Library at Oxford.
In the early part of Elizabeth’s reign appeared, too, the so-called Bishops’ Bible (now a rare book), under charge of Archbishop Parker, fifteen dignitaries of the Church being joined with him in its supervision. There were engravings on copper and wood—of Elizabeth, on the title-page—of the gay Earl of Leicester at the head of the Book of Joshua, and of old, nodding Lord Burleigh in the Book of Psalms. But the Bishops’ Bible was never so popular as the Geneva one. During the reign of Elizabeth there were no less than one hundred and thirty distinct issues of Bibles and Testaments, an average of three a year.
It may interest our special parish to know further that the first American (English) Bible was printed at Philadelphia, by a Scotchman named Aitkin, in the year 1782; but the first Bible printed in America was in the German language, issued by Christopher Sauer, at Germantown, in 1743.
But I will not encroach any further upon biblical teachings: we will come back to our secular poets, and to that bravest and finest figure of them all, who was born upon the Avon.