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.”