the Bible means. Written originally in Hebrew and Greek, painfully and inaccurately copied, doubtfully translated, transmitted to us through a thousand mists of doctrine and prejudice, it is yet still infused with the poetry, the visions, the metaphor, and the folklore of the East, to all of which we are alien. Thus the Bible, of all books, needs a commentary, and until comparatively recent years the kind of commentary which it has most conspicuously lacked is that which Literature alone can supply. "To understand that the language of the Bible is fluid, passing, and literary, not rigid, fixed, and scientific, is the first step towards a right understanding of the Bible," says Matthew Arnold. To read the Bible literally is the way to scepticism; to read it as literature is the way to essential and reasonable belief. Burns knew this when he wrote his "Cotter's Saturday Night." In two stanzas of that beautiful descriptive poem he presents the two great aspects of the English Bible; its messages to the soul and conscience, and its indestructible literary quality. Take them in this order:

The cheerfu' supper done, wi' serious face,
They, round the ingle, form a circle wide;
The sire turns o'er with patriarchal grace,
The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride:
His bonnet reverently is laid aside,

The priest-like father reads the sacred page,
How Abram was the friend of God on high;
Or Moses bade eternal warfare rage

With Amalek's ungracious progeny;

Or how the royal bard did groaning lie
Beneath the stroke of Heaven's avenging ire;

Or Job's pathetic plaint and wailing cry;
Or rapt Isaiah's wild seraphic fire;

Or other holy seers that tune the sacred lyre.

1 Lyart happets, grey temples.

2 Wales, chooses.

Wycliffe at Lutterworth sending out his "poor preachers" with the translation of the Bible (circa 1378)

READING THE BIBLE IN THE CRYPT OF OLD ST. PAUL'S CATHEDRAL
(After Sir George Harvey.)

The first-fruit of the Reformation in England was the reading of the Bible by the common people in England in various versions.
These were expensive and rare, and for safety the Bible in churches was always chained.

Broadly speaking, in the first stanza we have the Bible as the Word of God, in the second the Bible as literature. The one and the other make that Bible which has passed into the life and speech of the people, ennobling both.

Sir Arthur Quiller Couch, lecturing at Cambridge on "Reading the Bible," has placed before his students a few great sentences like these:

Thine eyes shall see the King in his beauty: they shall behold the land that is very far off.

And a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place and as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.

So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality. Then he says:

When a nation has achieved this manner of diction, these rhythms for its dearest beliefs, a literature is surely established. . . . The Authorised Version set a seal on our national style. . . . It has cadences homely and sublime, yet so harmonises them that the voice is always one. Simple men-holy men of heart like Izaak Walton and Bunyan— have their lips touched and speak to the homelier tune.

Bunyan derived his thought and his style from the English Bible. And Bunyan's Grace Abounding and his Pilgrim's Progress lead us back to this well of homely religion and English undefiled. Bunyan knew the Authorised Version of the English Bible as perhaps no other man has known it. Its language became his breath. In passage after passage of The Pilgrim's Progress we seem to be reading the Bible through the medium of his own words. Take these words of Mr. Greatheart in the Valley of the Shadow:

This is like doing business in great Waters, or like going down into the deep; this is like being in the heart of the

Sea, and like going down to the Bottoms of the Mountains: Now it seems as if the Earth with its bars were about us for ever. But let them that walk in darkness and have no light, trust in the name of the Lord, and stay upon their God. For my Part, as I have told you already, I have gone often through this Valley, and have been much harder put to it than now I am, and yet you see I am alive. I would not boast, for that I am not mine own Saviour. But I trust we shall have a good deliverance. Come let us pray for light to Him that can lighten our darkness, and that can rebuke, not only these, but all the Satans in Hell.

The language of the Bible shaped the speech of England, and Bunyan learned to use that language better than anyone else. In The Pilgrim's Progress the common people found no word or sentence they did not understand.

Tributes to the Authorised Version

The Professor of English Literature in Cambridge University continues:

Proud men, scholars-Milton, Sir Thomas Browne-practise the rolling Latin sentence, but upon the rhythms of the Bible they, too, fall back. . . . The precise man Addison cannot excel one parable in brevity or in heavenly clarity: the two parts of Johnson's antithesis come to no more than this, "Our Lord has gone up to the sound of a trumpet; with the sound of a trump our Lord has gone up." The Bible controls its enemy Gibbon as surely as it haunts the curious music of a light sentence of Thackeray's. It is in everything we see, hear, feel, because it is in us, in our blood.

Coleridge said that it "will keep any man from being vulgar in point of style." Assuredly it kept the Bedford tinker from being vulgar, and hardly less Daniel Defoe. The Bible profoundly influenced Ruskin's style; "it is ingrained," says his biographer, "in the texture of almost every piece from his pen." Macaulay