Influence of the Bible on the English Language
By L. A. Reed
THE death of Queen Elizabeth is one of the turning-points of English history. The age of the Renaissance and of the new monarchy ended with her life. For a few years before she died the whole realm had been silently changing. England as a nation had become united. It stood at the front of all European powers. France courted its friendship. Spain shrank from its mighty blows. The Papacy had practically withdrawn from the heretical island. Ireland at last had yielded to the rule of the Queen. And with the death of Elizabeth, Scotland joined England under the rule of a common King. The court of the King was no longer endangered by feudalism, the people were no more inclined to anarchy. Trade and wealth increased. Internal improvement of home and Church and State were daily augmented. Powerful political leaders arose from among the common people. Endless questionings, historical research, philosophical speculation, agitated the public mind, weakened its hold upon the traditions of the past, and aroused it to a contemplation of the new truths of the present. The nation, too, had become self-reliant. The conflict with the two great spiritual and temporal powers of Christendom, the Papacy and the house of Austria, had roused in the heart of every Englishman a sense of supreme manhood. It was plain, therefore, that a new age of English history must open when the lofty patriotism, the dauntless energy, the overpowering sense of effort, were turned once from the struggles with Spain and Philip, inward upon the improvement of the nation itself. In the providence of God the nation was led into a profound movement that was to do more for the advancement of England that all else besides. The nation had broken with the dead past, to find a new life and power from the Word of God. Of this particular and critical moment in the history of England we read from a standard authority: The popularity of the Bible had been growing fast from the day when Bishop Bonner set up the first six copies in St. Paul's. Even then, we are told, "many well-disposed people used much to resort to the hearing thereof, especially when they could get any that had an audible voice to read to them." But the "goodly exercise" of readers . . . was soon superseded by the continued recitation of both Old Testament and New in the public services of the church; while the small Geneva Bibles carried the Scripture into every home and wove it into the life of every English family. The book was equally important in its bearing on the intellectual development of the people. All the prose literature of England, save the forgotten tracts of Wyclif, has grown up since the translation of the Scriptures by Tyndale and Coverdale. So far as the nation at large was concerned, no history, no romance, hardly any poetry save the little-known verse of Chaucer, existed in the English tongue, when the Bible was ordered to be set up in churches. Sunday after Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered round the Bible in the nave of St. Paul's, or the family group that hung on its words in the devotional exercises at home, were leavened with a new literature. Legend and annal, war-song and psalm, State-roll and biography, the mighty voice of prophets, the parables of evangelists, stories of mission journeys, of perils by the sea and among the heathen, philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, all were flung broadcast over minds unoccupied for the most part by any rival learning. The disclosure of the stores of Greek literature had wrought the revolution of the Renaissance; the disclosure of the older mass of Hebrew literature wrought the revolution of the Reformation. But the one revolution was far deeper and wider in its effects than the other. No version could transfer to another tongue the peculiar charm of language which gave their value to the authors of Greece and Rome. . . . But the language of the Hebrew, the idiom of the Hellenistic Greek, lent themselves with a curious felicity to the purposes of translation. As a mere literary monument, the English version of the Bible remains the noblest example of the English tongue, while its perpetual use made it from the instant of its appearance the standard of our language. The power of the book over the mass of Englishmen showed itself in a thousand superficial ways, and in none more conspicuously than in the influence it exerted on ordinary speech. It formed, we must repeat, the whole literature which was practically accessible to ordinary Englishmen; and when we recall the number of common phrases which we owe to great authors, . . . which unconsciously interweave themselves in our ordinary talk, we shall better understand the strange mosaic of Biblical words and phrases which colored English talk two hundred years ago. The mass of picturesque allusion and illustration which we borrow from a thousand books our fathers were forced to borrow from one.—Green's "History of the English People," book 7, chapter 1. As one reads the vigorous account of the Bible's influence upon the language and thought of the people of that day, he can not but wish that the Bible were now having this same power. Regarding the influence of the Word upon the English tongue another writer says: In the department of language it has done so much that Homer and Cæsar hardly need be mentioned. They are for the few, the Bible for the million. Are we proud of our varied and exact English speech? The Bible largely made it. And no student seeking forceful speech can neglect the legal exactness, the ornate imagery, the peerless rhetoric and sublime words of the Bible. Many are the testimonies of men to this truth. When we are surprised at the compact, simple, vigorous style of any writer, we are sure to find that he owes it largely to the Bible. Many have gladly confessed it. Let me beseech these students, who from their opportunities and tastes ought to become the leaders of this age in lofty thought and its chief expression, that they study for history, philosophy, poetry, and a pure style of their expression, that volume that has silently lifted English speech to a height unknown to any other language on the face of the earth. Greece did one memorable thing. It gave the world a language fit for God to speak to man in. The sixteenth century did one thing. It gave us in the English Bible that English style that purifies feeling, that enlarges mind, gives strongest wings to thought, and lives in memory like the remembered music of the happy childhood days.—"The Bible in the World's Education," by Bishop Henry White Warren, pages 210-212. Thank God that countless thousands of English-speaking people have not yet forsaken the Grand Old Book. To it more than to anything else the Anglo-Saxon owes his prestige in the world. If he forgets and neglects that Word, decadence will set in; and tho like Capernaum he has been exalted to heaven by the power of the Word's example and teaching, he shall be brought down to ruin in his forsaking of the high ideals and practises of the Book. One can easily trace in the progress of the ages the uplift of that Book that—
Gives a light to every age;
It gives, but borrows none. That influence you and I may have to enrich our individual lives, our thought, our speech. Shall we turn from it? Can we afford to lose so much?