in its behalf. The Epistles and Gospels from the Bishops' Bible were retained in the Prayer Book till the final revision in 1661; the Psalms from the Coverdale-Cranmer translation (not made from the Hebrew) are still retained.

XVI. EXCELLENCE OF KING JAMES'S VERSION.-The Bible of 1611 encountered prejudices and overcame them; it had rivals great in just claims and strong in possession, and it displaced them; it moved slowly that it might move surely; the Church of England lost many of her children, but they all took their mother's Bible with them, and taking that they were not wholly lost to her. It more and more melted indifference into cordial admiration, secured the enthusiastic approval of the cautious scholar, and won the artless love of the people. It has kindled into fervent praise men who were cold on every other theme. It glorified the tongue of the worshipper in glorifying God, and by the inspiration indwelling in it, and the inspiration it has imparted, has created English literature. Its most brilliant eulogies have come from those who, hating Protestantism, yet acknowledged the grandeur of this Book, which lives by that Protestantism of which it is the offspring, that Protestantism to which, world-wide, it gives life as one of its roots. When to him who has been caught in the snare of unbelief, or drawn by the lure of false belief, every other chord of the old music wakes only repugnant memories, its words have stolen. in, too strong to be beaten back, too sweet to be renounced, once more the thunder of God's power, the pulsation of God's heart. Its faults have been hardly more than the foils of its beauties. It has so interwoven, by the artistic delicacy even of its mechanical

transfers, the very idioms characteristic of the sacred tongues, that Hebraisms and Hellenisms need no comment to the English mind, but come as parts of its simplest, its noblest, its deepest thought and emotion. Its words are nearer to men than their own, and it gives articulation to groanings which but for it could not be uttered. It has lifted the living world to the solemn fixedness of those old heavenly thoughts and feelings, instead of dragging them by low, secular phrase out of their high and holy thrones, down to the dust of the shifting present, or leaving them dim and dreary behind the fog of pedantry. It has fought against the relentless tendency of time to change language, and has won all the great fields; words have dropped away or have deserted their meaning, as soldiers are lost even by the side which conquers; but the great body of the army of its ancient but not antiquated forms, among the sweetest and the highest speech beneath the voices of the upper world, remains intact and victorious. The swords of its armory may have gathered here and there a spot of rust, but their double edge has lost none of its keenness, and their broad surface little of its refulgence. It has made a new translation, as against something old and fading, impossible, for it is itself new, more fresh, more vital, more youthful than anything which has sought to supplant it. We need, and may have, a revision of it. Itself a revision of revisions, its own wonderful growth reveals the secret of the approach to perfection. But by very virtue of its grandly closing one era of struggle it opened another, for in human efforts all great endings are but great beginnings. A revision we may have, but a substitute, not now-it may be never. The accidents of our Authorized Version are open to change,

but its substantial part is beyond it, until the English takes its place among the tongues that shall cease. The new revision will need little new English. Its best work will be to reduce the old English of the old Version to more perfect consistency with the text and with itself. That Version is now, and unchanged in essence will be, perhaps to the end of time, the mightiest bond— intellectual, social, and religious-of that vast body of nations which girdles the earth, and spreads far toward the poles, the nations to whom the English is the language of their hearts, and the English Bible the matchless standard of that language. So long as Christianity remains to them the light out of God, the English Bible will be cherished by millions as the dearest conservator of pure faith, the greatest power of holy life in the world.

THE ENGLISH BIBLE AS A CLASSIC.

BY TALBOT W. CHAMBERS, D.D.

Pastor of the Collegiate Reformed Dutch Church, New York.

KING JAMES'S BIBLE.-The merits of the Authorized Version, in point of fidelity to the original, are universally acknowledged. No other version, ancient or modern, surpasses it, save, perhaps, the Dutch, which was made subsequently, and profited by the labors of the English translators. But a version may be faithful without being elegant. It may be accurate without adequately representing the riches of the language in which it is made. The glory of the English Bible is that while it conveys the mind of the Spirit with great exactness, it does this in such a way that the book has become the highest existing standard of our noble tongue. Lord Macaulay calls it a stupendous work, which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.

It is true that Mr. Hallam (Literature of Europe, II, 58) dissents from this view, and seems to regard it as a sort of superstition; but surely he is wrong. The praise of our version is not confined to men of any creed or class, but comes from nearly every eminent critic. Men who differ as widely in other matters as Addison, Swift, Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, both the Newmans, and Mr. Ruskin, yet agree on this point; and Mr. Huxley gave voice to a common opinion when he said, "It is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form." It is, therefore, neither prejudice nor thoughtlessness which affirms this book to be the first

of English classics. Indeed, its pages speak for themselves. In simplicity and strength, in the union of Saxon force and Latin dignity, in idiomatic ease and rhythmic flow, they.have no superior.

STYLE OF THE VERSION.-Nor is it difficult to account for this. It is true that the style of writing which prevailed among men of letters in the reigns of Elizabeth and James I was not adapted to such composition. In many of these there was a strange fondness for alliteration, antithesis, fanciful analogies, pedantic allusions, and all sorts of conceits. Even Shakspeare has verbal quibbles which “make the judicious grieve." And when these are avoided, as in Bacon and Raleigh, there is a degree of stiffness, of inversion and occasionally of affectation, which would be an insuperable barrier in the way of popular acceptance and favor. The authors of our Bible seem to have been preserved from this error by a sort of providential preparation. In the course of the religious discussions which prevailed in England from the days of Wycliffe down there had grown up what Mr. Marsh calls "a consecrated diction," an assemblage of the best forms of expression suited to the communication of sacred truths. This dialect, if one may so style it, avoided equally the pedantry of the schools and the vulgarisms of the market-place. It never crawled upon the ground and never soared in the clouds. It was simple and direct, yet pure and dignified. It was intelligible to all classes, yet offensive to none. It seized as if by instinct the best elements of the vernacular speech, and moulded them into the most suitable grammatical forms; hence it is marked by the absence of book language or "inkhorn terms," and also of mere colloquial speech. The book was not the production