THE BIBLE IN LITERATURE
THE BIBLE'S PLACE IN LITERATURE
It may well be said that, like our English speech, our literature has drawn its material and its inspiration from many tongues and peoples. Its sources are world-wide. Its stream flows from innumerable springs and fountains. Some of them have been shallow and some have given up only the waters of bitterness, but many there are which keep the current broad and pure and deep. And of those fountains that ever pour out living water the most abounding is our English Bible.
So abundantly has our literature drawn from the Bible that a study of it is the very beginning of the knowledge of English writings. He alone can be called educated who knows this Book; for its style, its substance and its spirit are thoroughly woven into the thought and language of English-speaking people.
In the age of Elizabeth, when the Bible was translated, our English words were coming fresh coined to our language from the mint of life. New words were being made out of men's experiences. Such words brought the pictures and images of things and actions vividly to the mind as our abstract speech of to-day can never do. It was this living, concrete language which men like Tindale and Coverdale wrought into what became the King James Version; and with such mastery that to this day the Bible has no peer in the vigor, the directness, and the simplicity of its style. Then, too, in those days religious belief was often a matter of life and death. Many of the translators finally gave up their lives rather than to renounce their convictions, and it could only be that such men would give to the Bible a style that breathes always the noble dignity and earnestness of martyrs.
Thus he who would appraise our English writings must weigh whatever they possess of the earnestness, the simplicity, the vigor, the directness of the Bible. He must himself have mastered well that great source of English style.
Then who shall measure the treasures of the Bible substance that our writers have poured into their books? The Bible has contributed their language, their plots, their incidents, their characters, their moral lessons, even their names. Words can no more than faintly suggest how full to overflowing of the Bible is our literature. An allusion from the Scriptures adorns almost every page of such writers as Browning and Ruskin. Five hundred Biblical allusions appear in the Ring and the Book alone. Thousands of them are scattered through Shakespeare and in their use the poet climbs perhaps oftenest to the heights of his genius. It has been said that no other passage in Shakespeare has the sublimity of that one patterned by the lover of Jessica from the Book of Job:--
[Footnote: Lorenzo thus addresses Jessica. (See page 157.)]
"Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patines of bright gold;
There's not the smallest orb which thou behold'st
But in his motion like an angel sings."