Comfort Found in Good Old Books

by George Hamlin Fitch

The other series is known as the People's Library, and is issued by the Cassell Company of London and New York. This Library is sold at the remarkably low price of 25 cents a volume, well printed and fairly bound in cloth.

THE BIBLE

The Bible is the one "best seller" throughout the world. Last year Bible societies printed and circulated 11,378,854 Bibles. The Bible is now printed in four hundred languages. Last year the British and Foreign Bible Society printed 6,620,024 copies, or an increase of 685,000 copies over the previous year. Even China last year bought 428,000 Bibles.

The first English translation of the Bible which had a great vogue was what is known as the Authorized Version issued in the reign of King James I. For centuries after the Christian Era the Bible appeared only in the Latin Version, called the Vulgate. As early as the seventh century English churchmen made translations of the Psalter, and the Venerable Bede made an Anglo-Saxon version of St. John's gospel. Toward the close of the fourteenth century appeared Wyclif's Bible, which gained such general circulation that there are still extant no less than one hundred and fifty manuscript copies of this version.

Then came Tyndale, whose ambition was to make a translation that any one could understand. He said: "If God spare me life, ere many years I will cause the boy that driveth the plough to know more of the Scriptures than you priests do." His version of a few books of the Bible was published first at Cologne, but its acceptance in England was greatly hindered by the translator's polemical notes. Tyndale was burned at the stake in Belgium for the crime of having translated the Bible into the speech of the common people. He will always be remembered as the pioneer who prepared the way for the Authorized Version.

After Tyndale came Rogers, who carried on his work as far as Isaiah. He was followed by Coverdale who wrote fine sonorous English prose, but was weak in scholarship. His translation was superseded by the Geneva Version, made in 1568 by English refugees in the Swiss city. The Geneva translation is noteworthy as the first to appear in Roman type, all the others being in black letter.

The King James Bible was first proposed at the Hampden Conference in 1604. The Bishops opposed the scheme, but the King was greatly taken with it, and in his usual arbitrary way he appointed himself director of the work and issued instructions to the fifty-four scholars chosen. One-third of these were from Oxford, one-third from Cambridge and the remainder from Westminster. They worked three years at the task and produced what is known as the Authorized Version. There seems to be a strong prejudice against King James because of his eccentricities, and most writers on the Bible declare that this version was never authorized by King, Privy Council, Convocation or Parliament. This is wrong, for King James authorized the book, and it owed its existence directly to him. Anglicans and Puritans in this famous Conference were bitterly hostile to each other, and if they had had their way we should never have had this fine version of the Bible. The King was president of the Conference, but the two factions were ready to fly at each other's throats over such questions as the baptism of infants, the authority of the Bishop of Rome and others. The King, however, brushed all these questions aside. He said that the Geneva Bible taught sedition and disobedience, and by royal mandate he ordered Bishop Reynolds and his associates to make the best version in their power. So the credit which the King received by having his name joined to the Bible was well deserved.

The King James Bible or the Authorized Version has had greater influence on the style of English authors than any other work, and it remains today a model of the simplest and best English, with few obsolete words. Out of the small number of 6,000 words used in the Bible, as against 25,000 in Shakespeare, not more than 250 words are now out of every-day use.

The best short essay on the Authorized Version is by Albert S. Cook, Professor of the English Language and Literature in Yale University (N. Y., G. P. Putnam's, 1910). This was originally contributed to the Cambridge History of English Literature, but in book form it contains some matter not printed in the History. Professor Cook shows that the King James Bible today contains fewer obsolete or archaic words than Shakespeare, and that this version put into the speech of the common people a score of phrases that now are scarcely thought of as purely Biblical, so completely have they passed into every-day speech. Among these are "highways and hedges," "clear as crystal," "hip and thigh," "arose as one man," "lick the dust," "a thorn in the flesh," "a broken reed," "root of all evil," "sweat of his brow," "heap coals of fire," "a law unto themselves," "the fat of the land," "a soft answer," "a word in season," "weighed in the balance and found wanting," and so forth.

Between the Authorized Version and the New Revised Version a number of individual translations appeared. The Long Parliament made an order in 1653 for a new translation of the Bible, and three years later a committee was appointed, but as Parliament was dissolved shortly after, the project fell through. The individual versions for a hundred years are not noteworthy, but in 1851 the American Bible Society issued a "Standard" Bible which it circulated for five years. It was simply the King James Bible free from errors and discrepancies. Another important revision was made by the American Bible Union in 1860 and a second revision followed in 1866. Its salient feature was the adoption of the paragraph form.