The great function of the Semitic race in the world seems to have been the conception and the promulgation of the idea of the One Spiritual God. This idea, to which the race still holds, spread itself with an all-controlling influence over the civilized globe. It is the corner stone of the Christian and the Mohammedan religions. The Semitic race, of which the Hebrews are a family, has, or had, among its other gifts, the gift of sublime, intense, and imaginative utterance in prose and in poetry. In this respect it is without rival among all the peoples who have or who have had a literature. To these qualities it adds that of a direct simplicity, which in pathos (if with art, with an art so hidden as to leave not even the suggestion of consciousness), attains the power both of the ideal and the real, and never descends so low as sentiment. Of fancy, the Hebrew writers (for it is they whom we are now considering) exhibit none; less it would seem because of the nature of their themes, than because fancifulness was foreign to their intensity and loftiness of soul. The writings forming the most important part of the early Hebrew sacred literature form also, as we all know, that Old Testament which fills the largest part of the Bible—that is, the Book which has been for more than fifteen hundred years held sacred by all christendom.
This sacred Book—which, even if it did not contain the revelation of the idea of the One Eternal and Almighty God, and of his dealings with them who deemed themselves his chosen people, and the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth and of the great apostle to the Gentiles, would yet be the most remarkable collection of writings known in literature—it has been the policy of the church of Rome to keep from the people. Its translation into the vulgar tongue, and its distribution among the people at large, have always by that church been most earnestly discouraged, and even, until a comparatively late date, forbidden. It is remarkable that its earliest translations were into languages of Gothic peoples. Bishop Ulphilas’s translation of the Gospels and a small part of the Old Testament into the Mæso-Gothic language, in the fourth century, has already been mentioned. About three centuries later an Anglo-Saxon translation of the Gospels was made; and there is evidence, as we are assured by Bosworth,[C] in the rubrics[4] that portions of them were constantly read in Anglo-Saxon churches. But these versions did little to bring the Bible before the eyes of the people at large; and besides, they were, as we have seen, confined to a very small part of that book. The Old Testament remained to all intents and purposes in an unknown tongue until the dawn of the Reformation in England. Wycliffe and his followers translated the whole of the Bible about 1380; and from that time, notwithstanding bulls, and anathemas, and persecutions, this book of books, The Book, became the possession of the whole English people.
We are concerned here only with the effect of this momentous work upon the English language. It was great and peculiar. Wycliffe’s English version was followed in 1535 by Coverdale’s, which was afterward republished with revision, by Taverner’s, and by others, including the famous Genevan Bible[5], of which fifty editions were published in England within thirty years. These versions were mostly revisions, each “translator” availing himself, of course, of the text of his predecessors. Finally, in 1611, there was made what is known as the “authorized,” or King James I. version, which has since that time been, next to their common blood and common speech, the strongest bond of unity for the English race. But between the making of Wycliffe’s translation in 1380 and the middle of the sixteenth century, the Bible had taken strong hold of the English people. It sank into their hearts; it lifted their souls; its modes of thought became their modes of thought; its phrases, their household words. When Puritanism appeared, and strangely relied upon the Old Testament as its armory of theological warfare, the thoughts and the words of the prophets, priests and kings of Israel were the daily intellectual food of no inconsiderable part of the common people, and the air of all England was vocal with the phraseology of Job, of David, of Isaiah, and of Ezekiel. The effect of this upon the English mode of thought and expression was great and lasting; enduring even to this day. Its value was inestimable. By reason of it English diction acquired a simplicity, a strength, a directness, a largeness of style, a capacity of grandeur and of pathos, a richness and variety which it otherwise would not have acquired, and which has not been attained by the language of any other people. The spirit of Hebrew literature was transfused into the English mind to such a degree as to modify its mode of thought and of utterance. This took place because the diffusion of the Bible happened just at the time when the language was in a state of transition, and modern English was in course of formation. Had it not occurred until afterward, as was the case with other European peoples, it would have been too late to produce this effect. The English of Shakspere, of Milton, of Bunyan, and their great successors would not have existed but for the translation and diffusion of the Bible among the English people.
This, then, English is: a sturdy Gothic stem, largely and deeply grafted with Romanic scions, and permeated with the spirit of Hebrew sublimity and passion. These are the source elements of the supremacy of the youngest language of the Aryan stock. It unites all the powers and possibilities of its congeners, and adds to them those of the speech of the only other race that has felt and uttered the highest aspirations of humanity, and largely swayed the course of man’s progress through his unknown future.
[A] Quarter cousins. The Merchant of Venice; Act ii, Sc. 2.
[B] Omitting Sweyne, who was proclaimed king, but whose possession of the throne was brief, and whose regal authority was not fully established or recognized.
[C] See the preface to his edition of the Gothic and Anglo-Saxon Gospels with the versions of Wycliffe and Tyndall. London: 1865.