No people has been so devotedly attached to the Bible as the English, and the effect may be traced in all the great movements of English history. The Bible has dominated the whole domestic and political life of the English people for some centuries, and has provided the basis of the English conception of personal and political liberty.
The education of a large number of Englishmen has consisted mainly in the reading of the Scriptures. There is indeed no book, or collection of books, so rich in teaching or capable of appealing so forcibly to the unlearned and the learned alike. That the growth and gradual diffusion of religious and moral thinking is due to the supreme influence of the Bible is a fact which can be recognized throughout the whole of English history. As a single instance, we may take two writers who lived at different periods, and dealt with this subject from dissimilar points of view—the Rev. Paul Knell (1615–1664) and Matthew Arnold (1822–1888). Knell compared England with Israel. The name “Israel” was used by writers of his age with so much laxity, that it is impossible to define the sense which it was generally intended to convey. It often meant the Religion of Israel; at other times it was used as if it was a synonym of the word “Church.” But Knell used the word in its plain meaning: for him “Israel” meant simply the People of Israel in the Land of Israel (Appendix ii). If we compare the general tone and attitude of Christian preachers in those times in other countries with the attitude taken up by the English clergy, we must acknowledge that the latter have a much greater appreciation of the value and dignity of the Jewish people and of its great influence on the character of the English nation.
In spite of all modern developments, and notwithstanding the fact that modern science has undermined some of the old beliefs, the fundamental attitude of Englishmen to the Bible remains unchanged. There is no need to quote many writers; it is sufficient to refer to Matthew Arnold, who insists that Righteousness is the burden of Old Testament teaching, and that this idea has greatly influenced the formation of the English character (Appendix iii).
The indebtedness of English literature to the Bible is immeasurable. The Bible has inspired the highest and most ennobling books in the English language. No other book has been so universally read or so carefully studied. The Bible has been an active force in English literature for over twelve hundred years, and during that whole period it has been moulding the diction of representative English thinkers and literary men. The Bible is “the book upon which they have been brought up,” says Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), Nor has its influence on men of action been less marked. Englishmen picture Sir Henry Havelock (1795–1857) sustaining himself upon the promises of the Bible through the darkest hours of the Mutiny; Charles George (Chinese) Gordon (1833 –1885) writing with his Bible in front of him at Khartoum; and David Livingstone (1813–1873) in the loneliness of Central Africa reading it four times through from beginning to end, drawing from it patience, fortitude and perseverance. One of the mightiest moral forces of the last century in England, John Ruskin (1819–1900), acknowledges his great indebtedness to the Bible. “In religion,” he says, “which with me pervaded all the hours of life, I had been moved by the Jewish ideal, and as the perfect colour and sound gradually asserted their power on me they seemed finally to agree in the old article of Jewish faith that things done delightfully and rightfully were always done by the help and spirit of God.”
“I have before me one of those great old folios in black letter in which the pages, worn by horny fingers, have been patched together,” writes Hippolyte Adolphe Taine (1828–1893), in his Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise (Paris, 1863–4).[¹]... “Hence have sprung much of the English language and half of the English manners. To this day the country is Biblical; it was these big books which had transformed Shakespeare’s England. To understand this great change, try to picture these yeomen, these shopkeepers, who in the evening placed this Bible on their table and bareheaded, with veneration, heard or read one of its chapters. Think that they had no other books, that theirs was a virgin mind, that every impression would make a furrow, that they opened this book not for amusement but to discover in it their doom of life and death.”
[¹] History of English Literature, by H. A. Taine. Translated by H. Van Laun,... Edinburgh:... 1871.... (2 vols.).
“The Bible stands for so much in England: it is the foundation of our laws,” said Sir Lewis Tonna Dibdin, “for when you get back behind judicial decisions and Acts of Parliament you come at the bottom to the moral laws, of which the Ten Commandments were the first written summary.”
“The Bible,” says Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895), in his Essays on Controverted Questions, “has been the ‘Magna Charta’ of the poor and the oppressed.”
There is no Christian people even among the Protestant nations which could be compared with the English in knowledge of the Old Testament and in devotion to its teachings. This was the avowed object and the undeniable result of the English Reformation.
“Elizabeth (1533–1603) might silence or tune the pulpits,” says John Richard Green (1837–1883), “but it was impossible for her to silence or tune the great preachers of justice and mercy and truth who spoke from the Book.... The whole temper of the nation was changed. A new conception of life and of man superseded the old. A new moral and religious impulse spread through every class.”