MISCELLANEOUS ADDRESSES

THREE HUNDRED YEARS OF THE ENGLISH BIBLE

REV. WILLIAM RADER, SAN FRANCISCO, CAL.

When Napoleon drew his army up under the pyramids of Egypt he said: "Forty centuries look down upon us. Three hundred years lighted up by the English Bible look down upon us tonight. In the light of that lamp, let us reverently remember the men who wrung from other languages the Bible of the English-speaking world.

Caedmon, the monk; the venerable Bede; John Wycliffe, "Father of our later English prose,-the morning star of the Reformation;'' Tindale, characterized by Froude as "a man whose history is lost in his work, and his epitaph is the Reformation."

Let us remember the great Bibles between the age of Coverdale and King James, who in 1611 gave us the most precious memorial of any British king, known as the "King James Version" of the Bible. This Bible belongs to the people; it was as impertinent to monopolize it as it would be to fence in the sea, or claim the Alps for the benefit of a few. The great things belong to the people. The Bible was locked up in the Latin language, and great was the sacrifice of its liberation, but its freedom marked a new era in the history of mankind.

The English Bible lifted England to her rightful place among the great nations of Europe. From it her statesmen drew the law, her prophets their divine fire. For three centuries the English pulpit has been a throne of power, and the voices of her preachers have gone to the uttermost parts of the earth. It was the inspiration of style to the masters of English prose; Addison, Milton, Macaulay and Ruskin are colored by the majestic style of the Bible, while the poets from Chaucer to Kipling have been influenced in thought and expression.

It is a long step from King James to King George V. Today the venerable abbey, consecrated with its holy dead, quivers with the excitement of the magnificent spectacle of the ceremony of coronation, when the archbishop, representing the Church of the English Bible, crowns the King of England. That was a small England of James, but today it fulfills the noble apostrophe which our own American Webster pronounced: "The British Empire, whose morning drum-beat, rising with

the sun, and keeping company with the hours, encircles the earth with the unbroken strain of the martial airs of England."

America owes her Protestant principles and her democratic institutions to the English Bible. Andrew Jackson said: "That Book is the rock upon which our Republic rests."' General Grant called it "the sheet anchor to our liberties.''

Our later statesmen have caught the spirit of its power. William Jennings Bryan said: "No matter from what standpoint we view it, or by what standard we measure it, the Bible merits the title "The Book of Books.'', Roosevelt recently spoke to more people on the Bible than has any other living man.

It was a great day in the world's history when men of the Bible spoke to us in English; when Moses, without sacrificing his Jewish blood, addressed us in our own tongue; and when the tongue of the Prophets was translated into the vernacular. Greater still the hour when the people of the New Testament made themselves understood in a language common to our own lips and Jesus Christ was seen through English

eyes.

Since then the Bible has been discovering us, and we believe it, as Coleridge says, "Because it finds us."

The lofty ideals which are now determining the destiny of the nations have been drawn from this English Bible: Liberty which comes by truth, brotherhood rooted in the fatherhood of God, righteousness, the union of both, and international peace, the last like fruit from the tree of life.

We rejoice in the prospects for universal peace, and as American citizens are called to follow President Taft in making a permanent peace treaty with Great Britain. It is America's answer to three hundred years of the Bible. "What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.''

What then is our duty to the English Bible? I answer: Let us accept it as the permanent cause of our civilization, and not waste time in defending it. He who defends the Bible too willingly doubts it. It needs no defense after these years. Why prop up the sun with a stick of wood? It will not fall. The great masterpieces of Nature and Grace require no defense. Let us do the Bible and carry it into life,—into its politics and government, its storms and sorrows.

The Bible is to use, not to argue upon. Its true theology is found in its utility. It has the quality of endurance. "Though all things pass away, the Word of God shall endure forever and ever.

Its ultimate triumph has been pictured in the glowing imagery of the

Apocalypse of John: "And he was clothed in the vesture dipped in blood, and his name is called the Word of God, and the armies which were in Heaven followed him upon white horses clothed in fine linen, white and clean; and out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations; and he hath on his vesture and on his forehead a name written, 'King of Kings and Lord of Lords.'

THE BIBLE AND THE COMMON PEOPLE

DR. H. M. HAMILL, NASHVILLE, TENN.

It was a saying of Lincoln that "God must have greatly loved the common people, as he made so many of them." Whatever the measure or token of the Creator's love, his one divine Book, in content or intent, was chiefly meant for the common people. Especially was it designed to be the lamp unto their feet, and light unto their paths; their pillar of cloud by day, and of fire by night. It was the common people to whom the Hebrew prophet came with burdened heart, declaring the word of the Lord, as it was this same common people who thronged the footsteps of Jesus and heard him gladly. In every age and land, the Bible has found an open heart of belief and an uplifted hand of defense among the plain people. Its steadfast friends throughout the centuries have come, not from the ranks of the aristocracy, but from a simple and cosmopolitan democracy. The noble company of martyrs whose blood has been the seed of the Church has rarely found recruits outside of the common people. If "The steps of kings and priests and statesmen and soldiers,'' as one has said, "go sounding down the stately corridors of the Bible,'' it is but an incident to the power and presence of the multitudes of lowly worshippers in the templed courts of the Old Testament, or the plain people of the New Testament who waved their palm branches and sang hosannas to the Son of David. I would not wilfully underestimate the contributions of great men to the cause of the Bible, nor draw invidious comparison between the friendship and favor of learned or lowly towards God's great book. Wise men from east and west have brought their gifts of gold and frankincense and myrrh, and have given their purest and best in tribute to the honor and spread of the Bible. Great poets, like Milton and Shakespeare and Longfellow and Lanier, have found their inspiration in the Holy Scriptures. Great orators, like Burke and Webster, have received their afflatus from the matchless imagery and sonorous language of the English Bible. Great soldiers, like Wellington and Gordon and Grant and Lee, have paid tribute by word and deed to

the lofty heroism that shines forth from God's word. Great scientists, like Newton and Tyndal and Aggasiz, have delighted to honor a divine Book which compelled their admiration, though it did not wholly enlist their belief. Great statesmen, like Jefferson and Bismarck and Gladstone, have confessed their indebtedness to that strange and heavenly wisdom that marks the pages of Holy Writ. And so with many more of the elect ones of earth who have lighted their torches at this sacred fire of learning and wisdom and courage and inspiration, and have not been ashamed to give glory to the source of their power and fame. Yet of these I have named, and of a thousand unnamed whom the muse of history has enrolled among the great ones of earth, most of them owe their love for the Bible, and the honor they have paid it, to the training and associations of a childhood begotten among the common people. As the bare feet of the American plowboy, in daily contact with mother-earth, by some strange power of absorption draw up into his mind and heart the powers that lift him to leadership in the cities, so most of the great men of our own or any age have learned to know and love the Bible in their earlier years of plainness and poverty. It is the shame of genius that it commonly forgets the Giver of the wonderful gift, as it is too often the reproach of the worldly wise that God's word dwells not in their heart or upon their lips. From the days of Caiaphas until now, the sneer of the Pharisees has been heard, "Have any of the rulers believed on Him?"; and the glory of our English Bible for the three hundred marvelous years of its history has been that, while here and there its pathway has been lighted by the meteoric glow of greatness, it has moved steadily onward along an ever-brightening way amid the steadfast shining of the lesser lights of the common people. Daniel Webster's splendid figure before the United States Senate, in illustration of Britain's growth and greatness, may be changed to fit the majestic movement of our English Bible among the nations of the earth. "The morning sun,'' said the great orator, "in his triumphant march around the world, is everywhere greeted by the drum-beat of British soldiery." So in all the languages of men, in all the lands of the great world, is our matchless Book triumphantly moving to the hosannas of millions of the common people. I have no quarrel with the fact. I have no great sorrow of heart over the failure of much that is called greatness to render homage to the Bible. The Bible, in some cases at least, is better off without than with it. If a United States Congressman pays tribute to the Y. M. C. A., and prates of the "good old Book of the fathers," yet holds his discredited seat by virtue of proven bribery, I would rather have the grimy hand of a coal miner laid in reverence upon my Bible than all that a tarnished wearer of

the toga can do or say for it. Or when one who has spent a lifetime grinding the faces of the poor and driving to the wall in conscienceless and unlawful competition his business rivals, in his old age essays the role of a Bible patron and expositor in a vain attempt to commute with divine justice and American manhood, I would rather have the genuinely pious though ignorant word of comment upon God's word by a clodhopper or negro. And if some curled darling of the theological seminary, of pretentious and skeptical scholarship, whose chief end is to exploit his particular scheme of destructive biblical criticism and to enjoy the discomfiture of old-fashioned orthodoxy, should confront me with his polychromatic Pentateuch, his deutero-Isaiah and accommodated Messianic prophecies and expurgated miracles, I must be pardoned for seeking more congenial fellowship with the devout and believing spirits of the common people.

Why are these common people so dear to the Bible, and why is the Bible so dear to them? The first answer to that question is that the Bible has made the common people what they have become. Outside of Israel and its unique place among the nations of the world, when the Bible entered upon its mission of enlightenment, there were two classes only the human chattel who served, and the despot who ruled. Life and liberty and property were playthings of the tyrant by so-called divine right of kings. No more pathetic chapter in human history can be found than the blood-marked movement of the common people towards freedom of body, mind and spirit. They builded the pyramids of ancient Egypt and cemented their stones with their blood. The hanging gardens of Babylon, the temples of Thebes, the palaces of Nineveh and Tyre, the beauty of Damascus, were the work of their patient hands. They marched under the silver eagles of Rome unto the uttermost parts of the earth, and strewed with their bodies the conquering pathway of the Macedonian.

On through the dark ages, though chained in monkish cells, and closed against the people by priestly interdiction, the seed of Bible truth slowly germinated in the minds and hearts of the masses. Martin Luther's silver trumpet called out of the darkness, and Protestantism made answer. The right of the individual conscience, the plain people against titled princes, freedom of mind as well as body from the rule of despotism, were the battle cries that rang through Germany, Switzerland, France, England, Scotland and America. It was a battle of more than thirty centuries, but the Bible was the book of tactics, the chart and compass, and amid crumbling thrones and broken sceptres and discredited castes, and the hushing forever of the Satanic cry of the divine right of