Tomorrow will be observed in all English churches as the quater-centenary of the setting up in every church in the land of a copy of the Bible in English. Only two years before Tyndale had been burnt at the stake for translating the Bible; yet by 1538 the demand for it had grown so great that Thomas Cromwell, Lord Chancellor of England, issued the momentous order now celebrated. Besides the special services tomorrow, two most interesting exhiditions of old Bibles are now to be seen, one at the British Museum and one at Zion College on the Embankment at Blackftiars. It is also noticeable that most papers, particulary the popular ones, are publishing special articles about the Bible.
The Bible we use, as no doubt most people know, dates from 1611, when a committee of scholars was appointed by James I to produce the so called Authorized Version, necessitated by the number and fragmentary nature of translations which had appeared since Tyndale's. The extraordinary thing is that a commi! working under high pressure, should have produced a book which looks as if it had been written by one man. The translation is not alw ys quite accurate.
But this is perhaps of less importance than that the perfection of its language'has so imbedded itself in our language and affections that its influence on the-English people has been beyond calculation.
George Saintsbury thought that in the Authorized Version and Shakes. peace we have two monuments of literature above what any other nation can show, and instanced the well-known passage from the Song of Solomon, "Set me as a seal upon thy heart," etc, as perhaps the most exquisite piece of English ever written.
It is often deplored that people do not know the Bible as they used to do, But in this as in so many other things one ventures to think there are signs of a return to the past. Those special articles in the popular press are significant; so are the frequent correspondences about Bible reading and the allusions to the Bible by public men. I have heard it said that whenever the Chinese return to Confucianism, there follows a period of national renaissance, just as there was among the ancient Jews concurrently with their intermittent revivals of strict observance of the Mosaic law. If the English people took to reading the Bible regularly again, as they did last century, what might be the result,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.