This Biblical influence was felt long before the translation of the Bible into English. When King James I. (1566–1625) in 1604 sanctioned a new translation of the Bible, he let loose moral and spiritual forces which transformed English life and thought. But before this the Renaissance, or revival of learning, had led to the study of the Scriptures and so had helped to make men Puritans.
The Pilgrim Fathers crossed the ocean with little more than this sacred volume in their hands and its spirit in their hearts. The men who founded new Commonwealths built up their constitutions upon the teachings of the Bible; and tradition has long asserted that every soldier in Cromwell’s army was provided with a pocket edition, which consisted of appropriate quotations from the Scriptures, mostly from the Bible of the Jews.[¹]
[¹] Cromwell’s Soldiers’ Bible, London, 1895.
A close parallel can be drawn between the Puritans, of whom Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658) was the principal type, and the enthusiasts who shared with Judas Maccabæus (ob. 3628 a.m.) the dangers and glories of his illustrious career. Both were stern warriors forced into battle by the stress of great principles, and by the strongest sense of obligation to a sacred cause. Both fought for liberty against tyranny, against religious persecution and unrighteousness. The spirit which inspired them all was the secret of the world’s greatest achievements. The parallel can be traced even further. Cromwell’s life was shaped by the influence of the Bible. For a figure to compare with Cromwell we must turn neither to ancient history nor to early English history, but to the pages of Jewish national history in the Bible. Cromwell’s examples were Joshua (2406–2516 a.m.), Gideon (fl. 2676 a.m.) and Samuel (ob. 2882 a.m.). Hebrew warriors and prophets were his ideals. And that is not to be wondered at, for Cromwell studied the Bible every day with attention and reverence and with a desire to be guided by it. He was an intellectual and spiritual child of the Old Testament, and he “imagined himself to be a second Phineas, raised up by Providence to be the scourge of idolatry and superstition.”[¹]
[¹] Daniel Neal (1678–1743): History of the Puritans, vol. iv. (1738), p. 187.
CHAPTER II.
THE HEBREW LANGUAGE
Its survival and revival—Its influence upon the English mind—De Quincey—Bacon—Shakespeare—Milton—Cowley—Taylor—Tillotson—Barrow—Dryden—Parnell—Pope—Addison—Young—Akenside—Gray—Warton—Cowper—Byron—Shelley—Southey—Moore—Sir Thomas Brown[e]—Earl of Clarendon—John Pym—Viscount Falkland—Sir Henry Vane—Earl of Chatham—Browning—Tennyson—John Bright.
The Hebrew language, mysteriously preserved like Israel, the people after whom it is called, through the tempests of many centuries, politically annihilated, but spiritually full of vigour, has never ceased to be a vehicle for the expression of sublime thoughts and sentiments. Not only in the brilliant epoch of Hebrew literature in Spain, from the tenth to the fifteenth centuries, but since then, Hebrew has been written in prose and in poetry with power and effect unattainable in any of the languages that have ceased to live. It is entirely wrong to consider Hebrew a dead language. Hebrew has never been dead. At no time in its long history has it ceased to be employed by the Jewish people, as a medium for the expression, whether in speech or in writing, of the living thoughts and the living feelings of the Jew. Its use as a national medium of everyday speech came, indeed, to an end with the destruction of the political organization of the Jewish people. But that catastrophe did not destroy the life of the language any more than it destroyed the life of the nation. The marvellous revival of the Hebrew language in our times in Palestine, which is one of the greatest achievements of the Zionist movement, shows that the language was only neglected, and that it was essentially a living language.
The Hebrew language, with its naturalness and noble simplicity, has exerted an influence not less powerful than that of Biblical ideas on the English mind. Knowing little of artificial forms, it has a natural sublimity of its own, and a great logical clearness in discriminating between nice shades of meaning. It appeals strongly to the English mind, because it is the holy language, bringing the Divine Word and coming from the sanctuary of that ancient covenant, whose faithful guardians are the people of Israel. The Semitic word has within historic times exercised on the civilisation of the whole human race an influence to which no parallel can be found, and which, if the future may be measured by the past, is destined triumphantly to extend, for the incalculable benefit of mankind, to the uttermost bounds of the earth. The poetry of the Bible has no rival.