THE MARVELLOUS BOOK.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXI, Issue LXII, 8 April 1911, Page 9

THE MARVELLOUS BOOK.

(Dunedin Star.)

The tercentenary of the English Bible deserves the celebration it is to receive this month. The Authorised Version of the Bible came into existence three centuries ago. It was the outcome of what is known in history as the Hampton Court Conference, which met in 16U4. Dr Reynolds, President of the -Corpus Christi College, Oxford, "moved His Majesty that there might be a new translation of the Bible." He alleged in support of his request the presence of mimerous errors in the existing one.: It happened to chime in with the sentiment of the King. In July of that year we find him writing to the Bishop of London informing him that he had made out a list of fifty-tour learned divines, to whom the work might be entrusted. Various things delayed it. It was not till 1607 that a start was made. The King drew up rules for their guidance, many of which are more sensible than might have been expected from "the wisest fool in Christendom." The translating company were divided into six groups. The woivv went apace. At length, in 1611, it was completed, and it has held the field ever since. It has had practically no competitors till the new Revised Version was published in 1885; but the latter makes slow headway. The Authorised Version still remains the one in general use. * * * * *

Of the effect of this book on the life and literature of the people among whom it has gone it is impossible to write with any degree of adequacy. Green, in his "History of the English People," has described its influence upon England in memorable words, xie points out that no greater moral change ever passed over a, nation than j that which passed over England in the | interval that separates the middle of the reign of Elizabeth from that of the meeting of the Long Parliament. He says that the change was due to the Bible. There was practically no literature existing for the common people, and when the stores of the poems, histories, stories, parables, miracles of tne Bible were flung broadcast and filtered down among the masses the result was extraordinary. But still more so was vthe social and moral effect.

Elizabeth might tune her pulpits, but it was impossible for her to silence or tune the great preachers of justice, mercy, and truth which has been opened for her people. ... And its effect Avas simply amazing. The whole temper of the nation was changed. A new conception of man superseded the old. A new moral and religious impulse spread through every class.

It is needless to say anything regarding the formative influence of the Bible during the great Puritan era, or the part it has played in the political and religious revivals of later years. We know how its words proved the turningpoint in the lives of men like Wesley, Shaftesbury, Wilberforce, Howard, Booth, and others. And we know how these names are associated with some of the. greatest reforms in English history. • * * * *

We sometimes bear it said that the day of the Bible is over. The wish is occasionally father to the thought. But neither wish nor thought appears to have any firm foundation in fact. What are the facts? At the beginning of last century the Bible had been translated into about forty different languages, and perhaps spoken by twotenths of the population of the world. To-day it has been translated iiyto almost five hundred different languages and dialects, representing seven-tenths of the population of the world. The British and Foreign Bible Society sends out a Bible every five seconds. If the issue of a single day were piled up above the other, they would be higher than the cross in St. Paul's Church, London, 365 ft; During the century ended 1904 this society alone circulated nearly 189,000,000 of the Scriptures. The first book issued by the Society was the gospel in Mohawk for the Red Indians, on Mohawk ltiver. The centenary of the society was celebrated seven years ago. It asked then for 250,000 guineas to continue the publication of this marvellous book. And it got it, and more. No other book m tne world comes within sight of such a record. The "Pilgrim's Progress" is the runner-up, with a hundred languages to its credit. The prince of English poets, Shakespeare, has twentyaeven. Tolstoi, probably the most popular of living authors, can be read in forty-five different languages. And Thomas A'Kempis, the most popular book of devotion^ in twenty. But all these do not amount to half as much as that of the many-languaged Bible. And still the publication goes on at a rate unparalleled by any other in the world. This makes it a marvellous book.

We have not perhaps considered sufficiently the significance of these language data. Scores and scores of these languages had no written word whatever. Alphabets had to be invented for them, and words reproduced from spoken sounds. The Slavonic alphabet, for instance, was originally invented for the purpose of putting the Scriptures into what was then an unwritten jargon. Justice has never been done to the early vernacular versions in creating and ennobling the Teutonic languages. Luther's Bible was the matrix and source of modern German, while the Authorised Version was the child in a large degree of the versions of Tuidale and Coverdale. And every scholar will agree with Green, the historian, that "as a mere literary monument the English version of the Bible remains the noblest example of the English tongue." Cardinal Newman says that "it lives in the ear like music that can never be forgotten. Its felicities seem to be almost things instead of words." And as justice has never been done to the influence of the Bible translation in creating, purifying, and elevating the dialects into which "it has passed, still less, perhaps, has it been done to the labors of those forgotten men and women who spent their lives in the work. There is no more heroic chapter m history than that which contains this record. In the last. Christmas issue of Scribner's Magazine there is an article of Seton Thompson's, the i great naturalist, in which he re-tells the story of how a Methodist missionary invented a language and taught a whole nation to read and write it Away in the far west of Canada ttiere is a tract of country as large as Europe, minus Russia an 3 Spain. Here in the forties roamed the Cree Indians, and here came the Rev. James Evans to tell them the story of which the Bible is a record. He invented not exactly an alphabet, but a svllnbic. Soventythree characters are all that are needed to express 'the whole language. It is so simple that an Indian boy can learn it in a week or two. And practically nil the Indians to-d.iv use it. When the invention ancl sacrifice of this missionary was brought under the notice of Lord Dufferin in one of his visits to

the North-West, he said enthusiastically: "There have been buried m I Westminster Abbey, with national honors, many men whose claims to fame were far less than those of the devoted missionary, the man who taught a whole nation to read and write."

There is a place called. Pleasant Is-, land, a mere dot in the Pacific Ocean, 300 miles south of the Carolines. Here for ten years one lone missionary and his wife have been living. The former learned a language by ear, and then set it on paper phonetically. Then he translated the New Testament into it, and begged the American Bible Society to publish it. The society replied that it could not afford to publish the Bible in a language spoken by 6nly 1500 people. Then the tribe pledged itself to pay for the work if the society sent a printing press. The printing press was sent. The native helpers set up and printed the work, and despatched it for binding to San Francisco. Thus one more little South Sea Island has a written language and literature. Often the translator has to create words as well as alphabets. Thus, Avhat would a mountain mean to dwellers in some lowlying atoll? For "the lamb of God" the Eskimos, who had never seen a lamb, had to have it rendered "Little Seal." "Bad to eat" was as near as the translator in Mosquito could get for "sin." In Uganda he had to wait for five years before he could catch a Avord that would mean plague. Of these labors of love on the part of missionaries, perhaps one of the most impressive illustrations is that of Bishop Schereschewsky. Stricken with paralysis, he pounded out a Chinese translation with two fingers on the typewriter. For twenty years preceding 'his death he was practically confined to an arm chair. During that time he translated the whole Bible from the original Greek and Hebrew intto the easy Wenli dialect of China. He was unable to speak enough to be understood by a Chinese scribe. He could not hold a pen, having only one finger of each hand under control. So he made the translation with two fingers on the typewriter, and it was then copied by. hand intto the Wenli dialect by a Chinese woman, Mrs Wei. That is surely one of the greatest .Eterary achievements ever undertaken by any man.

Why is it that men and women by the thousand sacrifice their lives to spread abroad the knowledge of this Book? What is it, in itself, that has made and still continues to make it a transforming power in men's lives? At first sight, the Book itself makes the marvel greater. For what is it? x has been very well described as a booked: scraps—a planless cluster of pamphlets. It represents the literature of the most unliterary of races. It consists or some sixty booklets of the most diverse character, some of them unknown some of them of doubtful authorship' scattered thinly over sixteen centuries Ihey are made up of biographies, hymns, episodes, tribal history, laws of a social system that no longer exists, genealogies of men in whom nobody is interested, tales of long, far-off, 'forgotten things. One book is an eastern love story, another a collection of proyerbs after the Poor Richard order, a third a letter carried by an escaped slave, who is being sent back to his master. And so on. iSixty-six pamphlets written without concert, by - thinly-scattered line of unknown men sprinkled through 1600 years, preserved we hardly know how, packed "\vrfch mysteries, full of what seems irrelevant and tedious details; yet this heterogeneous mass of pamphlets has somehow managed to keep on the crest of the waves of progress for two thousand years. And this, judged by its mere output alone, is the mos£ widely-pub-lished book in the world

That is an amazing thing. What is the explanation of it? How does it come that the works of poets and philosophers, whose name and fame went tar and wide in their day, had cued and passed away, while this hanaful of scrappy literature has survived the wreck of matter and the crush of worlds ? We need not discuss the various reasons assigned to explain these extraordinary phenomena. We need only give the one winch seems to us the truest. Its advocates put it something like this: They maintain that this seemingly planless collection of pamphlets has a unity at heart. This unity is not dramatic or aesthetic. It is a living, evolving unity in a great historic crescendo. Its purpose is not m ritruct men about G°d, but to conyey God to men in a unique manitestation of word and deed: the manifestation of redeeming love. This delivers us from a whole tangle of lashes with which scepticism has scourged ignorant iaith through the centuries. For instance, if this be its purpose, then we need not be perturbed if we find there are errors in it. All we need require is that it be infallible for the purpose which it claims —viz., to make men what it calls wise unto salvation. "The Bible inspiration and infallibility are such as pertain to redemption and not to theology, to salvation and not to science or history. It is infallible as a gospel requires, not as a sysfem." And so the whole quarrel between Science and the Gospel is an entirely mistaken issue. This conception of the Bible also gets rid of another difficulty that has perplexed many: its lack of originality. It is compared with other sacred books—the Koran, the ZendAvesta, etc. —and its ethical teaching is found—much of it, anyway—in these.

Two points must be remembered here. You must ask not what they have in common, but what they had not in common. You must ask what these others omit, as well as what they insert. You dare not, for instance, print an unexpurgated edition of the Scriptures of India in English to-day. You would be prosecuted for publishing obscenity. Dr Fitchett writes: —

The Criminal Code of India expressly, exempts Hindoo temples from the law against obscene pictures and carvings. If enforced it would dismantle half the temples of India. The Hebrew and Christian Scriptures are not, like those of other races, a mass of clotted superstitions, a nightmare of insane dreams saturated with immorality, in which stray passages that show a gleam of truth can be discovered.

Rut the second and main point is this-. A book or system has alright to be judged by the end which it sets for itself^ and not by the truths or events that it touches or records on its road thereto. Shakespeare is full of errors —grammatical, historical, philosophical —but he is to be judged as a dramatist and poet, not as an analyst or a schoolmaster. " And so the Bible is to be judged by the- end it sets for itself. Its infallibility is to be determined not by the truth of its grammar, or science, but by the purpose which it claims for itself—viz., to reveal and to convey to men the highest, the diviuest life, and the most complete salvation. If ft fails in this, then it may be set aside as a discredited fraud.

But that it has not failed in this, is the testimony of history. Both Jew and Christian are its witnesses. That it does not fail in it to-day human experience in every variety of race and every rank of life abundantly testify. They vindicate what it claims for itself, that its words are "spirit and life.' A great writer, who passed. away the other day, has put it thus: "The physiologist cannot explain in chemical or biological terms the difference between the nerve-processes of an Australian blackfellow and a' Rubinstein."" Morphologically they are the same. The dissecting room presents no demonstration of the organic change. The laboratory has no light to shed upon this problem. But the one set of nerves has gathered up into itself the susceptibilities and the rare responsiveness of centuries of ancestral taste, and the other having failed to do so remains what it was at the beginning. The literary form of the Bible may not vary in anything which can be expressed by the rules of rhythm and prosody from the forms presented by other compositions Morphologically a sentence in Isaiah may offer no marked points of divergence from a sentence in Plato or Marcus Aurelius, but the one is charged with quivering soul-quickening energies lacking to the other. In the words winch profess to come from the Divine the stamp of origin is unmistakable, and. there is a living and organic affiliation with the Eternal.

It surely is a thing as ironical as it is disastrous that such a bock as this should not form part of the education °£ ™c youth of our land. It is sad that-the divisions which separate Christians should have resulted in banishing it from the public schools of this colony. Even on literary grounds it is to be deplored. But such a state of things makes it all the more imperative on the part of those who believe in this Book to see to it that their children are brought into vital contact with it. If the present celebrations help towards that end they will not be m vain. The greatest statesman of the last generation, and one of the greatest m our English history, spent the last working days of his life in seeking to commend to men "The Impregnable liock of Holy, Scripture." Using those sonorous sentences that so often came from his lips and his pen, he wrote:

Heaven and earth shall pass away, but My words shall not pass away. As they have lived, so will they live and work. In the retirement of the chamber, in the stillness of the night season, upon the bed of sickness and in the face of death, the Bible will be there, its several words winged with special messages to heal, to soothe, to uphold, to invigorate. And many of our readers will join Avith the thanksgiving so finely expressed in a poem by the venerable ex-Primate of Ireland, Dr Alexander, who, had he not chosen to be the first of preachers, might have been among the first of poets—the thanksgiving: For the instructive thought which' lies . In faithful hist'ries duly read, By words which sought for to mate wise, Give God instead; For song the stricken soul which calms For all that poetry of tears, Pathetic solaces of Psalms Outliving years; For all that broad prophetic ocean, Which not with separate currents tmn, But with one long unbroken motion To Christ sets in. Here is no touch of rust or moth; All that is old divinely new; All new divinely old, and both Divinely true.