To that I might answer, “How do you know that direct inspiration ceased with the Revelation of St. John the Divine, and closed the book? It may be: but how do you know, and what authority have you to say that Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey,’ for example, or Browning’s great Invocation of Love was not directly inspired? Certainly the men who wrote them were rapt above themselves: and, if not directly, why indirectly, and how?”
But I pause on the edge of a morass, and spring back to firmer ground. Our Bible, as we have it, is a translation, made by forty-seven men and published in the year 1611. The original—and I am still on firm ground because I am quoting now from The Cambridge History of English Literature—“either proceeds from divine inspiration, as some will have it, or, according to others, is the fruit of the religious genius of the Hebrew race. From either point of view the authors are highly gifted individuals” (!)—
highly gifted individuals, who, notwithstanding their diversities, and the progressiveness observable in their representations of the nature of God, are wonderfully consistent in the main tenor of their writings, and serve, in general, for mutual confirmation and illustration. In some cases, this may be due to the revision of earlier productions by later writers, which has thus brought more primitive conceptions into a degree of conformity with maturer and profounder views; but, even in such cases, the earlier conception often lends itself, without wrenching, to the deeper interpretation and the completer exposition. The Bible is not distinctively an intellectual achievement.
In all earnest I protest that to write about the Bible in such a fashion is to demonstrate inferentially that it has never quickened you with its glow; that, whatever your learning, you have missed what the unlearned Bunyan, for example, so admirably caught—the true wit of the book. The writer, to be sure, is dealing with the originals. Let us more humbly sit at the feet of the translators. “Highly gifted individuals,” or no, the sort of thing the translators wrote was, “And God said, Let there be light,” “A sower went forth to sow,” “The Kingdom of Heaven is like unto leaven, which a woman took,” “The wages of sin is death,” “The trumpet shall sound,” “Jesus wept,” “Death is swallowed up in victory.”
Let me quote you for better encouragement, as well as for relief, a passage from Matthew Arnold on the Authorised Version:
The effect of Hebrew poetry can be preserved and transferred in a foreign language as the effect of other great poetry cannot. The effect of Homer, the effect of Dante, is and must be in great measure lost in a translation, because their poetry is a poetry of metre, or of rhyme, or both; and the effect of these is not really transferable. A man may make a good English poem with the matter and thoughts of Homer and Dante, may even try to reproduce their metre, or rhyme: but the metre and rhyme will be in truth his own, and the effect will be his, not the effect of Homer or Dante. Isaiah’s, on the other hand, is a poetry, as is well known, of parallelism; it depends not on metre and rhyme, but on a balance of thought, conveyed by a corresponding balance of sentence; and the effect of this can be transferred to another language. … Hebrew poetry has in addition the effect of assonance and other effects which cannot perhaps be transferred; but its main effect, its effect of parallelism of thought and sentence, can.
I take this from the preface to his little volume in which Arnold confesses that his “paramount object is to get Isaiah enjoyed.”
VI
Sundry men of letters besides Matthew Arnold have pleaded for a literary study of the Bible, and specially of our English Version, that we may thereby enhance our enjoyment of the work itself and, through this, enjoyment and understanding of the rest of English Literature, from 1611 down. Specially among these pleaders let me mention Mr. F. B. Money-Coutts (now Lord Latymer) and a Cambridge man, Dr. R. G. Moulton, now Professor of Literary Theory and Interpretation in the University of Chicago. Of both these writers I shall have something to say. But first and generally, if you ask me why all their pleas have not yet prevailed, I will give you my own answer—the fault as usual lies in ourselves—in our own tameness and incuriosity.
There is no real trouble with the taboo set up by professionals and puritans, if we have the courage to walk past it as Christian walked between the lions; no real tyranny we could not overthrow, if it were worth while, with a push; no need at all for us to “wreathe our sword in myrtle boughs.” What tyranny exists has grown up through the quite well-meaning labours of quite well-meaning men: and, as I started this lecture by saying, I have never heard any serious reason given why we should not include portions of the English Bible in our English Tripos, if we choose.
Nos te,
Nos facimus, Scriptura, deam.
Then why don’t we choose?
To answer this, we must (I suggest) seek somewhat further back. The Bible—that is to say the body of the old Hebrew Literature clothed for us in English—comes to us in our childhood. But how does it come?
Let me, amplifying a hint from Dr. Moulton, ask you to imagine a volume including the great books of our own literature all bound together in some such order as this: Paradise
