YOU CAN SCARCELY SPEAK WITHOUT QUOTING THE BIBLE

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 174, 26 July 1938, Page 10

YOU CAN SCARCELY SPEAK WITHOUT QUOTING THE BIBLE

Four Hundred Years’ Influence

on English Language

The celebration of the four hundredth year of the open Bible in the churches of England, has brought vividly to public attention the immense influence that the Book has had in shaping the English language. Since Henry VIII. gave the historic order by which the Bible was placed in all churches throughout his Kingdom, the people have almost unconsciously absorbed its phrases and terms into their everyday speech. In the following article from the London "War Cry” Major F. L. Coutts of the Salvation Army arrestingly shows how “The Bible is in our Blood.'*

'J'WO young men-about-town stood on the ground floor of a block of newly erected mansion flats. They were languidly, but unsuccessfully, ringing for the lift, which appeared to be stationary somewhere in the heights. “Peradventure he sleepeth,” drawled one, referring to the invisible attendant. “Peradventure!” echoed the other. Did either know that he was quoting from Elijah’s magnificently ironic attack on the prophets of Baal? The language of the Authorised Version of Scripture has soaked into our common tongue for four centuries now, and supplies bone and marrow to our everyday speech. Unconsciously we borrow its phrases and imitate its rhythms. We use its idioms when we want to make a telling point or clinch an argument. By way of illustration, we could both edify and amuse ourselves by imagining any opposition speaker—with an eye on a general election two months ahead—standing at a street corner ready to pour out the vials of his wrath on whatever political party happens to be in power. In all probability he will declare that the government has seen the writing on the wall. They have been weighed in the balances and found wanting. They have been blind leaders of the blind. In fact, they have been like a house divided against itself ever since they took office. They have promised but not performed. But are the people deceived? No: for every tree is known oy its fruits. A government that has so ground the faces of the poor—(that is. not Marx, but Isaiah!)—can no more be expected to change its skin than a leopard its spots. Hope deferred has made the hearts of the people sick. The axe is now laid to the root of the tree. The Minister for War (or Mines, Education, Transport, Fisheries, Agriculture) who has represented this constituency for the last twenty years will have a greater fall than did Lucifer, son of the morning! Indeed, his conduct for several years has been a stone of stumbling and a rock of offence, and has alienated all rightthinking men. The government in which he is the chief (corner-stone, cumberer of the ground, hireling labourer, hewer of wood—other alternatives can be supplied if required) has made the country a spectacle to the world and to angels. He may be righteous in his own eyes, but his party is a byword in the land. So the speaker goes on from strength to strength. His tongue, as the Palmist declared anticipatorily, is as the pen of a ready writer. I need hardly add that almost every phrase in the above paragraph is from the Bible.

venture. We declare that stolen waters taste sweet. We bewail these continual wars and rumours of wars. Or here is another simple test. Can you name off-hand the sources of the following well-known phrases? “Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die,” “Unto the pure all things are pure,” “Heap coals of fire upon my head,” “Vengeance is Mine: 1 will repay.” (Now then, you Baroness Orezy fans!)’ “God loveth a cheerful giver,” "Use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake,” "The love of money is the root of all evil.” Would you be surprised to be told that every one comes from the writings of Paul? If we try to assess the worth of Christianity to the English tongue with a time-chart in our harttk, the results are even more illuminating. Augustine landed in England in 597, and within fifty years native versions of th» Psalms and Gospels were in circulation. Words such as “martyr,* “alms,” “sacred,” “disciple” date from the time of Alfred the Great. As the centuries unroll, Bede, Wycliffe, Tyndale, and Coverdale follow each other as men who have enriched our tongue by their translations of the Scriptures. Hard on their heels, the Oxford and Cambridge scholars who produced the English Version of 1611 (commonlyknown as the Authorised Version) gave us a Book which has remained the staple mental food of our island home ever since. “How real a creation,” said Cardinal Newman in mingled envy and admiration, “is the style . .. of the Protestant Bible. . . . Even though tha subject-matter were without meaning . . still the style would remain as perfect and original a work as Euclid’s elements or a symphony by Beethoven. And, like music, it has seized upon tha public mind.” Increasing knowledge confirms Newman’s judgment. The debates in tha rebellious Commons of Charles I. wera sharp, with the cut and thrust of Biblical metaphors. At an interval during a sitting, Cromwell would discuss the beauties of the Psalter as unselfconsciously as a member to-day might inquire the results of the semifinals of the English cup. The Authorised Version meant more to the land than even Shakespeare. Even to-day. no author of repute can either neglect it influence or escape its -;pell. Space forbids more than one example of this, but take what is held to be one of the best-informed accounts of the Great War yet written—the work of C R. M. F. Cruttwell, Principal of Hertford College, Oxford. How dees he make his points? He refers to his own book as timely because most of the leading figures in 1914-18 have now “published accounts of their stewardship.” He describes how (in 1916) Asquith was “inclined to agree with his adversary quickly,” but later “hardened his heart,” and quotes Lloyd George as saying: "You cannot win tha war with a Sanhedrin.” Later, tha same statesman “put new life” into certain folk and “confirmed feebla knees’.’ The historian refers to “tha hireling police” of the Tsarist regime, to “bowing in the house of Rimmon,” to “the milk and honey railway" (which rai from Suez to the gates of Gaza), to oui Mercantile Marine as being “it% journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of the sea, in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst.” Probably the last word on the place of the Bible in our common life was said by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. King Edward VII. Professor of English Literature at Cambridge, in tha spring of 1918: “No teacher of English can pardonably neglect what is at once tht most majestic thing in our literature, and by all odds the most spiritually living thing we inherit. . . « The Bible is in our blood.”

It is not too much to say that if all traces of the Bible were eliminated from our national life and speech, whole tracts of our literature would be unintelligible, while our language would falter and stammer worse than that of a child just learning to speak. How many times a week do we refer to the mote and the beam, to the widow’s mite, the wisdom of Solomon, the prophet not without honour save in his own country? We speak of straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel, of making bricks without straw, of a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand, of the need of fresh wineskins for new wine. We mourn the young fellow who is unstable as water. Although his mother can find no fault in him—he is the apple of her eye—he is perpetually halting between two opinions. As for ourselves, we seem to be born for trouble. Our light is doomed to be hidden beneath a bushel.

More cheerfully, we praise the giver of a cup of cold water. He is a veritable Good Samaritan, a man after our own heart. Contrariwise, we have uo room for the man who lives by bread alone. Frequently we draw a bow at a