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CHAPTER - INTRODUCTORY Point of View is that of the National History.-The English Bible our Greatest Classic.-Its Influence upon the National Life.-Division of the Subject.

CHAPTER - MEDIEVAL ENGLAND AND THE BIBLE General Subject of the Chapter.-English Bible a Late Growth.-The Undivided, and also the Eastern, Church, favored Native Versions.-The Latin Church averse to them.-Reasons for this: (a) Her strong sense of Catholicity: one Church, one Religious Language; The Church’s Retention of Latin saved the Classics for Posterity; (b) Problem of Western Church not Literary but Practical; (c) Nature of the Spiritual Needs of Medievalism.-Summary of Reasons.-Transition from Latin to Teutonic Aspect of the Question.-Saxon England never Romanised.-English Bible born of the Development of Teutonic Character and Language. Wycliffe represents this Development.-Conversion of England was a Gradual Process of Grafting.-Transformation of Heathen Bard into Christian Poet.- Caedmon.-Cynewulf.-Affinity of Saxon Temperament for Monastic Christianity.-Popular Poetry in the South; Abbot Aldhelm.-The Latin prevails over the Celtic Rule; Conference of Whitby.- Pictorial teaching of Religion; Benedict Biscop.-Lord’s Prayer and Creed vernacularised for use of Native Clergy.-Bede’s Version of Fourth Gospel.-Ninth Century Psalter.-King Alfred’s Decalogue.-Early Versions of the Gospels: (a) The Lindisfarne (or St Cuthbert) Gospels; (b) The Rushworth Gospels; (c) Anglo- Saxon Versions of the South.-Abbot Ælfric Translations from the Old Testament.-The Real Value of these early Translations.-They lead up to Wycliffe; Significance of his Bible.-Anglo-Norman Period; The “Ormulum,” etc.-First English Prose Versions of Scripture are the Psalters; (a) Attributed to Shoreham, 1320, (b) of The Hermit of Hampole, 1340.-Recapitulation CHAPTER - THE BIBLE AND SCHOLASTICISM Position of the Schoohnen in the History of Intellectual Progress.- Their Mode of handling the Bible.-Contrast between the Scholastic and Reformation Spirit.-Rise of the Medieval Schools.-And of the Schoolmen.-Nature of their teaching.-Theology and Aristotle.-The Twin Revelations.-Scholasticism and intellectual Casuistry.-Its Material, Dogma: its Form, the Syllogism.-Theology philosophised.-A Blend which is neither Philosophy nor Religion.-Relative insignificance of things mundane at this Period.-Result of the Labours of the Schoolmen.-The Quarrel of Faith and Reason.-Permanent Value of Scholasticism.

CHAPTER - WYCLIFFE AND THE BIBLES OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY Survivals of Wycliffe Renderings (from the Vulgate).-Object of the Chapter.-Double Character of Wycliffe. He represents a new Departure: (a) In Literature; (b) In Religion; Basis of his Religious Influence.-The undermining of Scholasticism and Medievalism. The Intellectual and Moral Revolt.-The Secularisation of the Papacy.-Its Feud with the Empire is succeeded by its Feud with France.-Rome abandoned for Avignon.-Degradation of the Papacy.-Its Rapacity and Unpopularity.-Its Clash with the Teutonic Spirit the key to Wycliffe’s Life.-The Strong and Weak Points in Wycliffe.-Three Stages in his Career: (a) 1336-1366; (b) 1366-1378; (c) 1378-1384.-First Stage.-Second Stage.-Third Stage.-Wycliffe’s two Bequests to his Country.-The Literary and Religious Bearings of his Work of Translation.-His Originality.-Rapid Spread of Lollardy.-Wycliffe’s Moral Courage.-Grandeur of the position of the Medieval Church.-The 1382 Version of the Bible.-The 1388 Revision of it.-Characteristics of the two Versions and Specimens of the Translation of 1382.-Note on Father Gasquet’s Theory.

CHAPTER - WILLIAM TYNDALE AND HIS WORK Summary of preceding Period.-Tyndale and Wycliffe.-The two Men are separated by the Renaissance.-The Bearing of this upon their Relative Positions.-Tyndale the real Father of the English Bible.-The Character of his Work.-Its Incompleteness.-Four Periods in his Life: (a) 15IO-1521; (b) 1521-1523; (c) 1523-1524; (d) 1524-1536.-Tyndale, Colet, Erasmus, and Luther.-Erasmus’ New Testament, and More’s Utopia.-Importance of Erasmus’ New Testament and Paraphrases.-Outbreak of the Reformation in Germany.-Corruption, Ignorance, and Indolence of the Clergy in England.-Tyndale’s Resolve to Translate the New Testament.-Tyndale and Bishop Tunstall.-Tyndale and Humphrey Mun-mouth.-His Qualifications as a Translator.-Goes to Hamburg.-To Cologne.-Cochlaeus, the Roman Catholic Spy.-The Quarto and Octavo Editions of the New Testament, 1525.-What has survived of them.-Tyndale’s Pentateuch.-Tyndale’s Jonah.-Revision of 1534.-Foundation of the Society of the Jesuits.-Martyrdom of Tyndale.-Retrospect of his Career.-Illustrations of his Translation.-Explanation of the Hostility which he encountered.-Nobility of his Character ......

CHAPTER - THE COVERDALE, MATTHEW, AND GREAT BIBLES Breach between Henry VIII. and the Pope complete before Tyndale’s death.-Fall of Wolsey and Rise of Cromwell.-Prospects of English Bible improved by Henry’s Attitude towards Rome.-The King’s Views on a Vernacular Version.-Anne Boleyn, Hugh Latimer, and Cromwell.-Review of the Events which led up to the Coverdale Bible.-Early Life of Miles Coverdale.-His friendly Relations with Cromwell.-The Bible of 1535.-It circulated without either Sanction or Prohibition.-And forestalled Cranmer’s Scheme of a Bishops’ Bible.-It was our first Complete English Bible.-Tyndale’s Enthusiasm contrasted with Coverdale’s Diffidence.-Coverdale’s Account of the Origin of his Translation.-His “Five Interpreters.”-Characteristics of his Style.-Specimens of it.-Origin of the “Matthew” Bible (1537), compiled by John Rogers.-The Aim and Object of it.-Description of the Book.-Its Importance in the Line of Versions.-Cranmer notifies its Arrival to Cromwell, and he to the King.-Its Authorisation by Henry, difficult to understand.-Suggested Explanation of his Action in the Matter.-The Origin of the Great Bible of 1539, edited by Coverdale.-It becomes the “Authorised Version.”-A Misnomer to call it Cranmer’s.-It is ordered to be set up in Churches.-Its Popular Welcome.-Disorderliness of the new Protestantism.-Authorisation of this Bible by the Bishops.-The “Taverner Bible.”-Influence of the Great Bible.-The “Catholic Reaction.” CHAPTER - THE GENEVAN, BISHOPS’, AND DOUAI BIBLES Henry VIII. the central Figure of the Reformation in England.-Nature of that Movement.-Henry’s Political Protestantism.-Cromwell given a free hand.-Henry startled by the “Pilgrimage of Grace.” Consequent Disgrace and Fall of Cromwell.-The Royal Pendulum swings towards Gardiner.-Flight of the advanced Reformers.-Triumph of the Jesuits at the Council of Trent swings the Pendulum back.-Death of Henry.-The Bible and the Protectorate.-The Bigotry of Mary Tudor.-What Protestantism owes to Smithfield.-Origin of the “Genevan Bib/e.”- Its great Success.-Coverdale and the Bibles of the Tudor Period.-Influence of Geneva in the Protestant World.-Calvin and Geneva.-The Genius of Calvin.-The Genevan “New Testament” of 1557.-The complete Bible of 1560.-Its Calvinistic Character and Significance.-Its Effect on Archbishop Parker.-Attitude of Elizabeth towards Translations.-Parker arranges for a “Bishops’ Bible.”-Its Publication and Characteristics.-Character of the Roman Catholic “Douai Bible.”-Cardinal Allen and Douai.-The Rheims-Douai New Testament.-Excitement in England at its Appearance at this Crisis.-Description of the Book.-Critical Value of its Fidelity to the Vulgate.-Greatness of the Vulgate . .

CHAPTER - THE AUTHORISED VERSION Its Unique Position.-Character of James I.-How this Version was related to the Millenary Petition.-The Selection and Organisation of the Revisers.-The Text on which they worked, and their Authorities.-Their Code of Instructions.-Publication of the Authorised Version.-Its Style and Diction.-The Revisers did not claim Finality.-Causes contributory to its Success: (a) Personal Qualifications of Revisers; (b) Their Sense of the National Dignity of their Work; (c) The Labours of their Predecessors; (a) The Sympathetic Temper of the Times; (e) Their well-planned Organisation; (f) The Literary Air which nourished them.-A Retrospect of the History of the English Bible....

CHAPTER - THE WORK OF REVISION After 1611 comes a Natural Pause.-Competing Versions.-Bibles with Curious Names.-The Long Parliament and Revision.-Cudworth and Bryan Walton.-The Belief in Verbal Inspiration.-Rise of Scientific Method.-Attack of the Deists on the Bible.-Walton’s Polyglot, Mill’s New Testament, Collins and Bentley.-Specimens of Eighteenth Century Translation.-The “Revision by Five Clergymen.”-Alford’s New Testament.-Studies preparatory to Revision.-Revision, why so long delayed.-Definite Steps towards a New Version.-The Instructions of the Convocation of Canterbury.-Position of the Revisers contrasted with that of their Predecessors in 1611.-Different Problem offered by the “Received Text” in Old Testament and in New.-Boldness of the Westcott-Hort Text.-The “Ancient Authorities” of the Revisers, and their Treatment of the Margin.-Summary of the Principal Classes of Defects in the Authorised Version.-The Twofold Disadvantage which impeded the Revisers of 1611.-The overrefinements of the Revisers of 1870.-Unnecessary Alterations made by them.-Conspicuous Merits of their Version.-Concluding Remarks.

APPENDICES A.-THE VULGATE OF JEROME.

B.-WYCLIFFE’ S DOCTRINE OF DOMINION C.-SOME BIBI.ES WITH CURIOUS TITLE.

D.-BIBLIOGRAPHY For it is, perhaps, the best way first to draw a sketch in outline, and then afterwards to fill it in.

CHAPTER - INTRODUCTORY IT would be difficult to name a subject more full of interest for an Englishman than the evolution, through a long series of revisions, of our national Bible.

Regarded as Scripture, as the message and revelation of God to man, it is to our religious consciousness and to our moral needs that the Bible, in whatever language, must always make its primary appeal. But our English Bible has also its historical side. Regarded as the greatest of English classics, and the most venerable of the national heirlooms, it is as Englishmen that we have learned to love it. By the bond of a common literary heritage it unites the whole English-speaking race. It throws back its ancient roots into a past from which we now stand removed by an interval of not less than twelve hundred years. It interweaves itself with the most momentous crises of the nation’s fortunes. It is sealed with the blood of martyrs. It is hallowed and endeared to many a heart by memories of the old home days. It has quickened, moulded, and sustained what is best and strongest in our individual and corporate life. Bone of our literary bone, and flesh of our literary flesh, it has exercised upon English character an influence, moral, social, and political, which it is not possible to measure.

Unique in dignity, unique in grandeur, unique in stately simplicity, it is the noblest monument that we possess of the genius of our native tongue.

It is of this national Bible that we now propose to trace the history. When did we get it? Whence and how? Who were its first sponsors? What was it that originally suggested such a work? Was it born of some chance literary impulse, or shall we find it coming to meet us on the crest of some great religious wave?

In order to find answers to these and to other kindred questions, which will naturally occur to any one who approaches the subject as a comparative stranger, we shall have to pursue a path which at the outset is neither welldefined nor continuous, but which broadens out as we advance.

It is not till somewhat late on in English history that we come upon a complete vernacular version. Yet in one shape or another the Bible story has been among us from our national infancy. We need not, therefore, plead guilty to any spirit of antiquarian pedantry, nor to a weakness for “beginning the tale of the Trojan war from Leda’s egg,” if the chapter which next follows has been in part devoted to a preliminary survey of those fragmentary forms in which a native Bible begins to become dimly visible almost as the curtain rises on our history.

To this survey of the place occupied by the Bible in the Middle Ages, there has been added, in Chapter III., a brief sketch of its relation to Scholasticism in the university schools.

With Wycliffe and the versions which since the end of the fourteenth century have been associated with his name, we shall pass from the period of ecclesiastical tutelage to that of nascent independence; from the one Empire, and the one Church, to the many nations and many Churches, and shall make acquaintance with the earliest of English Bibles. From Wycliffe we shall go on to William Tyndale, to Miles Coverdale, and to the other translators of the Tudor period with whom begins that long series of Bibles to which the authorised and revised versions both equally belong. The next stage will introduce us to our golden age of creative inspiration, when Scholarship and Letters came forth to lay their united service at the feet of Religion, and to dedicate to her that famous book which has been the pride of England for now nearly three hundred years. Descending to more prosaic times, to this silver age of industrious research, it will be our concluding task to review the causes which led up to the long and patient labors of our last revisers, who, without claiming for their work a finality which is beyond human reach, may none the less prove to have been laying a firm and lasting foundation for that national and popular Bible for which we have still to look. Such an ideal Bible would be based on the purest attainable text; would be so printed as to be read with unmixed delight; and would have the seventeenth century translation of the text only so far revised as to satisfy the legitimate demands of a not too microscopic scholarship, while perpetuating, with a wise and chastened discretion, the beauties of the Authorised Version.... A man may prophesy, With a near aim, of the main chance of things As yet not come to life, which in their seeds And weak beginnings lie intreasured. -Henry IV., Part II., Act iii., Sc. I.

CHAPTER - MEDIEVAL ENGLAND AND THE BIBLE IT is proposed in the present chapter first to consider the working of certain influences which served to retard the translation of the Latin Bible of the Church into English, and next to gain some idea of the extent to which certain portions of that Bible had been brought within the reach of our forefathers, whether lay or clerical, before the last half of the fourteenth century.

Christianity, let us remember, first reached these shores as early, as the second century, and its light was only temporarily eclipsed by the invasions of the heathen Teutons. Upon its reappearance at the close of the sixth century there followed an outburst of literary activity in Northumbria, to which, at that early date, no parallel can be found in any other country of the West. It may seem, therefore, at first sight a little difficult to understand why the Bible, as a whole, should have remained untranslated until the time of Wycliffe.

It is true, no doubt, that in this respect England was no worse off than her neighbors. We may even say, that, with the exception of the Goths, we can point to no Teutonic people who came earlier into the possession of a vernacular Bible. Nay more; for, if we look closely into it, this very exception will be seen to be more apparent than real, inasmuch as Bishop Ulfilas, who in the fourth century gave the Goths their native version, in a translation from the Greek of both Testaments, was a bishop not of the Western but of the Eastern Church.

But it is one thing to show that England formed no exception to the general practice of Western Christianity, and another thing to discover how that practice had come to be established. On one point, at any rate, there can be no doubt. Let its origin be what it may, it was not derived from the primitive Church. To the early Fathers, to St Chrysostom or Origen, to Augustine or Jerome, could they have come back to life, it would have seemed a reproach to Christianity that a nation of Teutonic speech should remain restricted to a Latin Bible. We find, accordingly, that by a very early period the Holy Scriptures had been translated into Syriac, Armenian, Egyptian, and into other Oriental tongues, as well as into Greek and Latin.

Nor did the Eastern Church depart from the principle by which the undivided Church had been governed. She, too, afforded ample proof of her desire, that, for every nation within her communion where the Christian faith had made its way, these Scriptures in the vernacular should be made accessible to all alike.

Why is it, then, we naturally ask, that between primitive and medieval Christianity, between the Church of the East and the Church of the West, so marked a contrast should exist. If Constantinople made no endeavor to impose a Greek Bible upon the Slavs, why should Rome have imposed a Latin Bible upon the English? Why should the Vulgate have been within its rights at Canterbury, while a Teutonic Bible would have been a trespasser at Rome? The problem is worth examination, and will repay a little attention.

The early introduction into this country of an English Bible might conceivably have been brought about in one or other of two ways. On the one hand, a demand might have asserted itself from below; or, on the other hand, the Church might have felt that in so important a matter it was her duty, as the one educational institution of the times, to take a strong initiative herself. But a little consideration will be sufficient to satisfy us, that, as a matter of fact, it was impossible that there should have been any demand for a translated Bible from below. For in Anglo-Saxon days, and even down to a far later period, there were very few persons outside the monasteries and chapters who could read their letters. Manuscripts, too, were scarce and costly, and it was only by hand that they could be multiplied. Under such circumstances an English Bible would have found no reading public ready to profit by it.

Still, as native converts multiplied, and as numbers of them passed through the schools connected with the monasteries into the ranks of the clergy, the idea of a native Bible might well, it would seem, have suggested itself to the scholars and teachers of the Church. In the golden days of Northumbrian letters such a work could not have been beyond their powers. Why was it, then, that the Church held back? How are we to explain the fact, that, although for at least a hundred years before the coming of the destroying Danes, English literature flourished so vigorously in the North, and although it revived again, in the form of prose, with King Alfred in the South, yet no English Bible appeared before Wycliffe, and no English Liturgy before Cranmer?

It is evident that whatever the explanation may be, we cannot ascribe the delay either to any fear of heresy, of which there was not then so much as a whisper to be heard, or to any latent feeling of hostility on the part of the religious houses towards the Anglo-Saxon tongue itself. It is true, no doubt, that scholarship did not long remain at the high level which it reached in Bede; and true also that the general trend of monastic culture inclined more and more towards Latin. But, on the other hand, the home language was never at any time proscribed, or even kept at a distance. So far, indeed, was this from being the case, so far was Anglo-Saxon from being slighted as the uncouth speech of a race but just emerged from heathenism, that it was under the shelter of the Church itself that our native literature was encouraged to put forth its earliest shoots. We must turn elsewhere, therefore, for a solution.

May not one reason be that we hardly realize the intensity of devotion with which the Vulgate was regarded? May it not be that a new departure, which to us seems now so natural and obvious, would have struck the mind of a medieval monk as a wanton innovation on an order of things which in his eyes stood consecrated by immemorial prescription? Does not the very conception of a national Bible, like that of a national Liturgy, carry us out of the medieval period of tutelage and tend to associate itself with the kindred ideas of national individuality and national independence?

And if such be the case-if the possession by a people of the Scriptures in their own mother tongue involves either a recognition, or at least a prophecy, of spiritual emancipation and of intellectual adolescence-we begin to see the matter in a different light. For in the Middle Ages the principal of ecclesiastical unity was of all principles the most self-evident and the most axiomatic. The belief in the one Empire and the one Church, in the World-Priest and in the World-Monarch, was the most deeply-seated conviction of the times. Notwithstanding that discordance between the theoretical and the actual which is so striking a characteristic of the medieval world, it stamps and pervades the entire period which lies before us throughout the present chapter. And the dethronement of the official Latin Bible by a vernacular version would have seemed to be an insidious attack on the authority and catholicity of the West.

Let us bring to mind for a moment the position towards which Rome had already begun to aspire, a position to the consolidation of which the forgery of the False Decretals in the ninth century was so powerfully to contribute.

Gregory the Great, from whose side Augustine came, was no doubt perfectly sincere when he denounced, as nothing less than flat blasphemy, the claim of his brother patriarch of Constantinople to the title of “Universal Bishop.” But his sincerity interferes in no way with the fact that the tide of events was already running rapidly that way, only that Rome, and not Constantinople, was marked out as the future seat of spiritual empire. No sooner had the Roman bishops been set free from secular control than they began to see visions and to dream dreams of sovereignty.

The transfer to the East of the imperial throne was an event by which the ecclesiastical supremacy of the West was made ultimately inevitable. In part Rome achieved greatness, and in part she had greatness thrust upon her. Step by step the Patriarch expanded into the Pope, and the natural primacy of the chief bishop into the divinely constituted authority of the representative and lineal successor of St Peter. Christendom required a head, and the natural head was Rome. Upon the shoulders of the Papacy had fallen the mantle of the dying Empire, and she bore towards the converted the same relation that Caesarism had borne towards the conquered. Her traditions, her instincts, her aspirations, her ambitions, had all been cast in a mould which was neither local nor national, but catholic and universal. It is not difficult to see the bearing of such an institution as this on the question of a national Bible. The majestic dignity, the absolute claims, of the medieval Church could not but be reflected back upon the character of her sacred books. As there was but one Church, one Pope, one Faith, so also must it have seemed part of the universal order that there should be one consecrated language in which that Faith should rest enshrined, and in which that Church should offer up to God her worship.

To break in upon the order, to throw the hallowed and stately diction of the Vulgate-that Vulgate which after violent and prolonged opposition had come to command a reverence not far removed from actual idolatry-into the rude dialect of a half barbarous people scarcely yet redeemed from Paganism, may well have seemed something so intolerable as to savor strongly of actual profanation.

It is natural that our first feeling should be one of regret that a different course was not adopted. But there is at least one ground on which, as Hallam long since pointed out, we may feel deeply thankful. For when the old world fell to pieces, the Church was the one and only institution which survived the general wreck. Unless this Church had thrown a halo of sanctity over the Latin tongue by retaining it as the language of her Bible and of her worship, as well as the channel of her diplomatic intercourse, her ecclesiastical administration, and her religious study, the fate of classical learning must inevitably have been sealed.

These considerations may in some degree serve to reconcile for us the friendly attitude of the Church towards the vernacular literature with her accompanying sense of the sacredness and inviolability of the Latin scriptures and liturgy. But there were other causes at work which helped to delay anything beyond fragmentary translations, and in order to understand in what they consisted we must turn to the world of practical life.

In the mission-field of Latin Christianity the activity of the representatives of the Church was necessarily conditioned by the nature of the material with which they had to deal. In Anglo-Saxon England it was not until the work of Theodore and of Adrian had been done, that religion, towards the end of the seventh century, ceased to be tribal and migratory, and began to settle slowly down into an organisation which was fixed and territorial, and into an ecclesiastical unity which was the foster-nurse of the monarchy.

Archbishop Theodore had found the country a mere loose chain of scattered monasteries and mission-stations, the Italian mission having its center at Canterbury, and the Celtic mission at Iona. At his death, in A.D., there had been organised a national and episcopal Church, established on a parochial basis, and endowed with a staff of resident pastors. But it was a Church whose members were as yet anything but ripe for a vernacular Bible.

The educated clergy were content with their Vulgate, and neither the Anglo-Saxon kings nor their lay subjects would, as a rule, have been able to make anything of a written manuscript. Nor would a Saxon Bible have been of much service to the mass-priests, or country-clergy, who stood between the illiterate population and the monks. Even if their education had been less rudimentary than it was, they could have had but little leisure for Bible-reading, while expensive manuscripts would have been quite beyond their means. It was no literary task which lay before them in those rough days, but one of a wholly different nature, and a task, moreover, which was arduous enough to tax all the energy that they could devote to it. It was the task of taming the wild beast in the Saxon nature; the task, in an age of violence and lawlessness, of disciplining their converts through the power of example, of sympathy, and of self-sacrifice; the task, in a word, of organisation, of authority, and of moral government. What the Church had to do, writes Bishop Westcott, “was to subdue new races, to mould a Christian Society, to vindicate the majesty of Divine Law in the face of barbarous despotism, to witness to the reality of the eternal and the unseen in the face of rude passion and brute force.”

There is still one further aspect of the matter which should not be overlooked. The Bible was not for our medieval ancestors what it is for us.

In any endeavor, therefore, to understand the influences which may be conceived to have actuated their Church, we must be on our guard against anachronisms. For we are apt, though unconsciously, to carry back ideas and feelings which belong to our own times into an age when they were unknown. To men of the present day the Bible comes with a set of certain well-defined historical associations. We cannot altogether disconnect our conception of it from the position which properly belongs to it in Reformation times. By a natural train of ideas it contrasts itself in our minds with “Tradition.” It allies itself with an intellectual and moral disposition, with a way of looking at and thinking about religious questions, which, since Protestantism is rather a temper than a creed, may be described as Protestant or individualistic. It is necessary, therefore, to beware of losing our historical perspective. The Bible, so far as regards an apprehension of its moral and spiritual value, was one thing for men of the intellectual stamp of Wycliffe, or Tyndale, or Cranmer; and quite another thing for men of an earlier day, such as Gregory and Bede. For the wants of the medieval mind lay in a wholly different plane from the wants of the Reformation mind. It was not the open Bible towards which the England of the monks naturally inclined. Medievalism asked not for a book but for religion externalised in an institution. The age was one not of reflection but of faithful and undiscriminating obedience. It found its full satisfaction in the rule and guidance of the visible Church. It was this visible Church which kept the keys of heaven and hell, and to which the custody of the Holy Scriptures had been entrusted. In this Church, and in her alone, the religious ideal of those times found its full realisation. Too ignorant for doubt, too uncritical and superstitious for a reasoned faith, inert and torpid under the numbing influence of an incurious acquiescence, men gratefully accepted at the hands of a nursing mother the spiritual sustenance which was best adapted to their intellectual childhood.

It may assist us to take an illustration. If we were to be asked at the present day what we conceived to be the central fact of the Bible, we should point at once to the personality of Jesus Christ. But in the worship of the Middle Ages the figure of the Redeemer had almost receded out of sight. “Pray first,” (so the worshipper was bidden,) “Pray first to St Mary, and the Holy Apostles, and the Holy Martyrs, and to all God’s Saints... and end by signing yourself, and by singing your Pater Noster.”

Christ was to be sought and found not in the Bible but in the mass, and it was only through the sacraments that the human soul could be permitted to approach Him.

It was not, then, in a spiritual but in a sensuous, in a symbolic, and in a materialised form that the Church in those far-distant days presented her teaching. So low indeed had sunk the general mental level that men were well-nigh incapable of any abstract conceptions at all. Religion, accordingly, tended more and more to resolve itself into a mere piety of ritual, and into a mechanical system of external observances. There was a craving for the concrete, the visible, the pictorial; for something which the bodily senses could readily apprehend; for ideals embodied in institutions; for shrines and relics; for ornate services; for an imposing ceremonial. The Virgin and the Saints, as being in nearer touch with man than the more awful personalities of the Trinity, were invited to perform what Holy Scripture had defined to be the mediatorial work of the Savior. The Bible, as the story of the redeeming love of a Father, had more and more faded out of view, while allegory and legend had substituted in its place a miscellany of Christianised mythology. Between the educated and the uneducated, between the clergy and laity, there stood interposed the double barrier of a priestly class and of a foreign tongue. Such, to use the terminology of these modern scientific days, was the “psychological climate” of the Middle Ages, and it is plain that it was not of a character to inspire men with any personal interest in the question of an open Bible.

We are now, perhaps, more nearly in a position to understand why the Latin Bible which accompanied the monks from Rome should have enjoyed so long a reign.

It was maintained, then, in the first place, because its maintenancc was in full harmony with the spirit and genius of Latin Christianity. It was maintained, in the second place, because whereas the work of translation is essentially a literary task, and needs both some adequate motive to inspire it and a public to give it welcome, the Church of those early centuries was confronted with the great practical problem of discipline, while there was as yet neither any such inspiring motive nor any such reading public. It was maintained, lastly, because that sense of the value of an open Bible which is so prominent a feature in Teutonic Christianity either formed no part of the medieval consciousness, or, if present to it at all, was yet dwarfed into relative insignificance by an all but universal belief in the mediatorial efficacy of the ordinances of the Church apart from the individual responsibilities and moral life of her children.

In this jealous retention of the Latin tongue, the Church, from her own point of view, was amply justified. Latin was an indispensable link in the chain by which Christianity, as then understood, was moored to the contemporary world of thought and action. It was mainly by the exclusive use of one and the same ecclesiastical language that the unity of Christendom, religious, official, and diplomatic, was kept cemented.

Clearly, therefore, it was of vital importance that no new literary pretender should be permitted to endanger a monopoly on whose preservation so much was felt to depend.

The apprehension of such a danger was indeed no empty dream. Looking onward from earlier times to the developments of the fourteenth century, we find the centrifugal and self-asserting spirit of nationality busy in the consolidation of the secular State, and in moulding into literary form the languages of a new world. And even as we watch, the venerable unity of the Latin Church is seen slowly dissolving away, while there falls upon the ear the death-knell of the Middle Age, and the footfall of the Renaissance.

Thus far we have been mainly occupied with the influence of the Latin element in the history of the preparatory period now under consideration.

It is time to approach the subject from its other side, and to turn to the Teutonic element in that history.

When, in the person of Augustine, Rome revisited the country which she had in times past administered for some four hundred years as a Celtic province, she found herself among a people who had been in no degree Romanised. Unlike the Franks and the Goths, the Saxons had never felt the magic of the Roman name and influence. They knew nothing of Roman modes of thought and feeling. Teutons in blood, in speech, and in religion, they were a loose aggregate of tribes to whom, under the Anglo-Saxon kings, their new island home, lying outside the boundaries of the Roman Empire and hidden away far beyond the confines of the West, had given a position of exceptional independence. Still their strong instinct of political liberty was not felt to be irreconcilable with due loyalty in their ecclesiastical obedience to Rome. As we unfold the scroll of our history, we may imagine ourselves to be watching the busy Saxon workshop in which the raw material necessary for the making of a home Bible is all the while being steadily fashioned. Such material lay ready to hand ill the development of the English language and in the independence of the English character.

It was Wycliffe’s Teutonic love of truth and freedom which moved him to give his countrymen the open Scriptures as their best safeguard and protection against the moral corruptions and bondage and obscurantism of Papal Rome; and it was the growth of the English language into a literary medium of expression, ripening for his work of translation as Italian had ripened for Dante, and as German was presently to grow ripe for Luther, which first made a people’s Bible possible. Among the many claims which our national Bible has upon our veneration is the witness which is borne by its language and by its history to our imperishable instinct of race. Socially, politically, and ecclesiastically we owe much to the stimulating shock of successive invasions and conquests. But it is not by the grace alone of either Roman, Dane, or Norman that we are what we are today. It is mainly by the effectual working of that sturdy Saxon spirit which from the first has coursed so strongly in our blood.

The conversion of England to the Latin faith is sometimes pictured to us under a strange misapprehension of the facts. It is represented as though it had been of the nature of some sudden and startling transformation scene, or as if it might best be compared to the swift sweep of some huge tidal wave, pouring itself irresistibly over the land, and submerging at once and for ever the old Teutonic gods, the old customs, the old beliefs, the old everyday life, of our Pagan forefathers.

Very different was the actual progress of this new faith as we catch its reflection in our early annals. Although the adoption of Christianity by the tribal king carried with it the nominal acquiescence of the tribe itself, yet the moral change, at the best, was but of gradual and tardy growth. There was an intervening process of action and reaction, of ebb and flow, of success and failure; and it was only step by step, and before the successive exertions of Roman, Celt, and Greek;-of Augustine, of Aidan, and of Theodore-that Woden gave place to Christ. Not by persecution, but by gentleness and persuasion, by preaching and teaching, by the moral power of devoted lives, by the prestige and splendor of Latin Christianity, the fierce Saxon warriors were attracted, tamed, and won.

The policy which, through his letters, Gregory was careful to impress upon his mission, was in the main a policy of conciliation and compromise. The sturdy stock of our Teutonic parentage was not recklessly and suddenly hewn down by foreign axes to make room for an alien growth. On the contrary, the new was so gradually grafted upon the old, that, in the more remote districts, remnants of the ancient Paganism lingered sullenly on for centuries. The change which little by little came over the country was effected rather by tactful adaptation than by revolution. The old Adam of the Teuton was not all in a moment washed away by the waters of baptism.

Just as the feasts of Eostre-tide and Yule-tide became, after a while, the Easter and Christmas of the Church; just as while the months of the year preserved the nomenclature of Rome, the divinities whom Penda worshipped lived on as the tutelary guardians of the days of the Christian week; just as the temple in the grove survived within bow-shot of the church upon the hill, and the Holy Rood just alongside of the sacred tree; so, too, the native language and the native character of the convert were welcomed by the monks into their service, and were made instrumental to the furtherance of their evangelising work. Under the encouragement and protection of the Church a home-born literature grew up during the seventh and eighth centuries as the lowly handmaid of religion, and the heathen bard became transformed, under the inspiration of a nobler creed, into the Christian poet.

Such a poet was Caedmon, the Amos of English literature, a poet probably of mixed Celtic and Saxon blood, and the earliest of our English singers.

To the music of his native harp the Bible-story, in the form of a poetic paraphrase, begins to pass out of its old Latin into its new English dress, out of the dim seclusion of cell and school to the open sunlight of the countryside, and from the narrow limits of the parchment-scroll to the wandering minstrelsy of the vernacular poetry.

Caedmon’s date is the latter part of the seventh century, and his poetry was in truth the only Bible of the Anglo-Saxons. In a sense, therefore, he belongs almost as much to the history of the English Bible as to the history of English literature. Little is known about his personality, and that little we learn entirely from Bede. An illiterate peasant of Northumbria, he worked as a farm-laborer in the employ of the bailiff of the great Abbey of Whitby, known at that time as “Streane-shalch.” The Lady-Abbess was the Princess Hild, a convert who had received baptism at the hands of Paulinus, the Apostle of Northumbria, and one of Augustine’s little band.

The ancient abbey stood high up on the cliff just where the abbey church of Whitby stands today. Doubtless there was some underlying basis of fact for the legendary story which we owe to Bede, and which reminds us of the call of Hesiod to the service of the Muses on the slopes of Mount Helicon.

The poetry which had so long lain hidden in the heart of one of the unlettered dependents of the monastery may well have been quickened into utterance by the vitalising breath of Christianity. For Bede, however, who was but a child when Caedmon died, the wonder-working spirit of the times has shed the lustre of the supernatural, over a tale which even without its aid would have been sufficiently remarkable.

Caedmon had passed the term of middle life without having shown any signs of poetic genius. It had been his habit, at the festive gatherings in the great mead-hall, when the harp came round to him and it was his turn to sing, to rise from his seat and leave the feast, either because he knew not how to sing, or because the rough war-songs of the Saxon bards were no longer to his taste. One night when this had happened, and he had gone out to look after the horses and the cattle, he fell asleep in the stable buildings, and as he slept he heard a voice saying, “Caedmon, sing to me.” And he said, “I cannot sing, and for that reason I have come away from the feast.”

And again the voice was in his ears, “Caedmon, sing to me ;” and he answered, “What shall I sing?” “Sing to me the first beginning of created things.” So the words came unbidden to his lips, and in his dream he sang his hymn of praise to God thc Creator. Whether we have the hyinn just as he sang it is not certain, but the sense of the opening lines is as fonows:- “Now must we praise the Maker of the Celestial Kingdom, the power and counsel of the Creator, the deeds of the Father of Glory, how he, since he is the Eternal God, was the beginning of all wonders, who first, Omnipotent Guardian of the human kind, made for the sons of men Heaven for their roof, and then the earth.”

And in the morning he told the wonder to the bailiff, and the bailiff brought him up to the Lady Hild. And when sufficient trial had been made of him, it was found that he had indeed the divine gift. For no sooner had any portion of the Bible-story been translated to him out of Latin by the monks, than he forthwith sang it to the accompaniment of his harp in the short alliterative lines of Saxon verse.

At the invitation of the abbess he now put off the secular habit, received a welcome into the company of the brethren, and became duly instructed in the entire course of sacred history. “And he turned into sweetest song,” continues Bede, “all that he could learn from hearing it, and he made his teachers his listeners. His song was of the creation of the world, of the birth of man, of the history of Genesis. He sang, too, the Exodus of Israel from Egypt, and their entrance into the promised land, and many other of the narratives of Holy Scripture. Of the incarnation also did he sing, and of the passion; of the resurrection and ascension into heaven; of the coming of the Holy Spirit, and the teaching of the apostles...; in all of which he tried to draw men from wicked ways to the love of well-doing. For he was a most religious man.”

Bede’s beautiful tale will at once be seen to be of the greatest interest and significance. The details of Caedmon’s poetry lie outside our limits, but its rise and spread are closely connected with the subject of the English Bible.

At a time when our rude ancestors were quite unqualified to receive instruction in a written form, portions of the Bible-story began to be sung in their ears in the well-known strains of that old Teutonic minstrelsy which was their delight, and even in the very terms of the familiar Saxon warfare.

For, in the poetry of the Caedmonic cycle, the Abraham of Hebrew history will be found figuring in battle as a genuine Saxon Atherling, while the Israelites themselves fight with all the savage fierceness of the hosts of Penda.

Nor was this minstrelsy confined to the monastic circle, but its songs were sung before the King and his warriors, and among the peasantry and artisans of the village and the homestead. Other and later poets, such as Cynewulf, seem to have caught something of Caedmon’s primitive inspiration, though they sound a more reflective and self-conscious note than his. Through his means, and through theirs, the Scripture narratives circulated for many generations throughout the North, and the common folk acquired, in a form which fixed itself in their memories, a rudimentary Bible-knowledge to which, otherwise, they must for long have remained strangers.

This cycle of popular poetry was not restricted either to the Old Testament or to the New, for it is in the poems attributed to Caedmon, that, for the first time in England, we meet with the great legend of Satan, the leader of those rebellious angels who challenged the power and sovereignty of God, and were in consequence cast headlong out of heaven. Whence it was that this legend, made familiar to us all by Milton, may originally have been derived, it is not easy to say, nor is the passing allusion to it in the epistle of Jude of much help to us. Probably it may have worked its way from the far East through Alexandria into the West; but the question, full of interest though it be, is not one which could suitably be considered here.

The wide and enduring popularity of the religious vernacular poetry shows clearly the natural attraction which, especially in its narratives, the Bible must have had for the Teutonic imagination. Nor is there anything in this to cause surprise. For if on its lower side the Saxon temperament had its elements of fierceness, of coarseness, and of sensuality, it was not wanting in a higher side. Our ancestors brought over with them many a mental feature which developed itself, as time went on, and became more marked under the influence of a higher faith. Among such features we may point to their deep sense of the divine in nature, their grave moral earnestness, their loyalty, their practical turn of mind, their love of poetry and song, their wistful curiosity about the unseen world. All these combined together to form a complex consciousness which responded eagerly to the preaching of the monks, and to the natural influence, upon wild untutored impulses, of the ordered austerity and self-effacement of the early monastic ideal while yet in its untarnished freshness. It was not long indeed before the monasteries began to degenerate into mere cities of refuge, within which men and women sought to escape from a world in which they had become either too effeminate, or too ascetic, or too indolent, to work and fight.

But at first these scattered houses were the only local centres of spiritual life and light, the only fortresses which could give shelter to those singlehearted pioneers of Christianity who went forth, as “the chivalry of God,” not to escape from, but to battle bravely with the world, and to redeem it as best they might from the bondage of ignorance and of sin.

While Caedmon was singing in the North, the popular poetry was being utilised in the South for the purpose of religious instruction by Aldhelm, Abbot of Malmesbury. Impressed with the sense of how little the peasantry seemed to care for his English sermons, the good abbot, who was one of the most skillful musicians of his day, took up his position in the garb of a minstrel on a bridge over which they had to pass, and having first enthralled his audience by the sweetness with which he sang, he presently attuned his song to a religious note, and so by the magic spell of the Muses won over to a better life many an uncultured soul whom a homily would have only sent to sleep, and whom even the terrors of excommunication would have left lamentably unmoved.

But it was not to the ear alone that the missionaries made their earliest appeal. The momentous decision of the Whitby Conference, in A.D. 664, had caused Northumbria to break with Iona and Celtic Christianity, and to follow the rule of Canterbury and Rome? By that decision England lost much, but gained even more than she lost. She lost the fervor of Celtic enthusiasm, and the earnest simplicity of the Celtic missionary spirit. But the Celt was better suited to win converts than to train and manage them when won. Through Rome England gained the power of organisation, the power to develop herself into a national Church, while she was preserved from the sterility and narrowness which are born of spiritual isolation. The local center of gravity was transferred from the monastery to the bishop, the unity which was an indispensable condition of her advancement was made possible, and the infant Church, now become once for all an integral part of the religious system of the West, was placed in permanent touch with what remained of Roman civilisation and culture. The change soon made itself felt in many ways, and in none more significantly than in the rich embellishment and beautification of church interiors.

Benedict Biscop, Abbot of Wearmouth towards the close of the seventh century, brought over fi’om Rome a number of religious paintings, which he arranged in his churches so as to present to the wandering and curious eyes of those who were unable to read, the chief scenes in the lives of patriarchs and of apostles, of the Virgin and of Jesus. “The most illiterate peasant could not enter the church without receiving profitable instruction. He beheld the lovable face of Christ and His Saints, or learned from looking at them the important mysteries of the Incarnation and Redemption, or he was induced by the sight of the Last Judgment to descend into his own breast and to deprecate the anger of the Almighty.”

In this manner was the story of the Bible gently yet forcibly brought home to ignorant worshippers from the countryside through the ministry of poetry and art, and a kind of rude preparation made for the miracle-plays, the religious, drama, and the Biblia Pauperum of later centuries. But the peasantry were not the only class who in these early days were calling for an interpreter. As converts multiplied, so did the need increase for parish priests to minister among them and to teach them, while to the large majority of such native clergy Latin would naturally be an unknown tongue. Bede speaks of these native clergy as “Sacerdotes idiotae,” by which he means priests who knew only Anglo-Saxon, and he tells us that it was mainly for their guidance and use that he often busied himself, and that he encouraged other scholars to busy themselves, in translating into the vernacular the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed. As bearing on this point we may quote an injunction to parish priests which appears in the canons of Ælfric, Abbot of Ensham, in the century before the Norman invasion:- “The mass-priest shall on Sundays and mass days tell to the people the sense of the Gospel in English, and so too of the Pater Noster and the Creed. Blind is the teacher if he know not book-learning.”

It is to be feared, however, that this not very exalted standard was often far above the attainment of the country parson of the tenth century.

Bede also translated into Anglo-Saxon the Gospel of St John, and perhaps we may infer from his selection of the fourth gospel for his purpose that the three earlier ones had been translated already. In him, therefore, we have the first link in the chain of translators, which, through Wycliffe, Tyndale, Coverdale, and their successors in the continuous work of revision, binds the eighth to the nineteenth century in the history of the English Bible. Cuthbert, one of Bede’s devoted followers, has told us the story of the completion of his master’s labors, and a very touching story it is. Through the whole of the Eve of Ascension Day, 735 A.D., the grand old monk of Jarrow, the ablest scholar of his time in Europe, had been dictating, though with waning strength, his vernacular version of St John.

Evening came on, and then the night, but there still remained one chapter untranslated. “Most dear master,” they reminded him when morning broke, “there is one chapter yet to do.” “Take then your pen,” he said, “and write quickly.” The spirit indeed was willing but the flesh was fast failing, and one by one the brethren came to his bedside to say their last farewells.

Then, as darkness again began to close in, the little scribe whose place it was to be near him bent down and whispered, “Master, even now there is one sentence more,” and he answered him, “Write on fast.” And the boy wrote on and cried,” See, dear master, it is finished now.” “Yes,” murmured the dying Saint, “you speak well, it is finished now. Take therefore my head into your hands and lay me down opposite my holy place, where it was my wont to pray.” And so, on the pavement of his little cell, they laid him down, and with the “Gloria” on his lips the aged monk delivered up his spirit, and departed hence to the heavenly kingdom.

Nothing has come down to us of Bede’s English work. No doubt it perished together with many other treasures of the Northumbrian monasteries when the Danes laid the land waste.

Passing onwards to the latter part of the ninth century, we have had preserved to us an English Psalter, now in the Cotton Collection at the British Museum, not written out in an independent form, but “interlineated,” as it is called, with a seventh century Latin manuscript of the Psalms, according to the Roman Psalter, which is believed to have been the identical copy sent over by Gregory for the use of Augustine soon after his arrival in Kent.

Religious life was nearly extinct when Alfred the Great gave all his energies to the revival of a native literature. “I thought I saw,” says the King in the preface to his translation of the Pastoral of Pope Gregory, “how, before all was spoiled and burnt, the churches were filled with treasures of books, yet but little fruit was reaped of them, for men could understand nothing of them, as they were not written in their own native tongue. Few persons south of the Humber could understand the services in English or translate Latin into English. I think there were not many who could do so beyond the Humber, and none to the south of the Thames.”

We must not linger over the version of the Decalogue which this splendid King, in his characteristic spirit of religious reference, places at the head of his Book of Laws, or on his unfinished version of the Psalms, and we travel on accordingly to notice certain notable translations of the Gospels, all of which date from about this period.

The earliest of them, like the Psalter just referred to, is in interlinear form,-that is to say, it is a word-for-word rendering of a Latin original, in which each English term is as far as possible placed under its Latin equivalent. The interlineation, as distinguished from the original document, was made, as experts tell us, in the tenth century, and is in the dialect of Northumbria.

A special interest attaches to this version, a survival of bygone centuries, which may now be seen in the British Museum. The Anglo-Saxon translator describes himself therein as “Aldred,” miserrimus et indignissimus, a priest of Holy Isle, and the date of his work is considered to be not later than the middle of the tenth century. The Latin manuscript which he uses as his basis is the famous volume known under the various names of “The Lindisfarne Gospels”; “The Book of Durham “; and “The Gospels of St Cuthbert.” The writer of it was Eadfrith, Bishop of Lindisfarne; and the manuscript belonged at one time to Durham Cathedral, and is supposed to have been in use by no less a person than St Cuthbert. It has been inferred with great probability, from internal evidence, that the Bishop copied the Gospels, towards the end of the seventh century, from a Latin version which Adrian, the friend and companion of Archbishop Theodore, had brought with him to England in 669 A.D. The present binding in gilt and precious stones is quite modern, being the gift in of the Bishop of Durham.

The Latin, like the Latin from which all these tenth century interlineations are derived, is not identical with that which we find in the text of the Vulgate. It belongs to the far more primitive Latin versions of the Bible which are known collectively as the “Old Latin.” Great, therefore, is the interest which lies in the reflection that these Gospels take us back as far even as the middle or end of the second century, a date earlier by many generations than that of our oldest surviving uncial manuscripts of the New Testament.

Eadfrith’s work was done in honor of St Cuthbert’s memory, and the manuscript itself, exquisitely bound, was buried at Lindisfarne with the body of the Saint. Towards the end of the ninth century both book and body were carried off by the monks to Ireland, to escape violation at the hands of the marauding Danes. From Ireland they were shifted hither and thither, until at last they found their way back to Lindisfarne, and, when the monastery there was finally dissolved, these precious Gospels, with Aldred’s gloss written between their lines, were purchased by Sir Robert Cotton, and are now included in his priceless collection at the Museum in London.

A generation or so later in date than the Lindisfarne Gospels another Anglo-Saxon gloss was made, which was written by an Irish scribe, MacRegol. This manuscript has come down to us, under the name of its donor, as the “Rushworth” Gospels, and is now preserved in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Two notes have been appended to the parchment which inform us of its authorship. “ Farmen the presbyter,” we read, “this book thus glossed.” And again, “ Let him that makes use of me pray for Owun, who glossed this for Farmen, priest at Harewood.”

To the tenth and eleventh centuries belong also several closely-related versions of the Gospels, one of which was much in use in Wessex. There is a copy of it in the British Museum, and it is of particular interest as being an independent version with no accompanying Latin original. They may all very possibly be variants of some original which has not been identified, but neither their authorship nor their precise date has, so far, been determined.

At the close of the tenth century, or early in the eleventh, Abbot Ælfric, the grammarian, from whose canons we have already quoted, made an Anglo- Saxon version of the Pentateuch, and also of Joshua, Judges, Esther, Job, part of the Book of Kings, and the Books of Judith and Maccabees. In translating the history of the Maccabean rising, Ælfric says he was impelled by a hope of thus kindling among his countrymen a patriotic war-spirit against the Danes. He tells us, moreover, that he was able to make some use of earlier versions, but none such have up to the present time been recovered. It must be remembered, however, in explanation of the gaps in our biblical literature which are so much to be regretted, that the national records have sadly suffered from the barbarism of the Dane, as well as from the contempt of the Norman for all things Saxon, and from the purblind zeal of Protestant fanaticism at the time of the Reformation.

With Ælfric ends the story of those isolated and fitful efforts in the field of poetic paraphrase, gloss, and translation, of which evidence has come down to us from ante-Norman times. It is scarcely necessary to say that the literary form and character of our Bible has not been in any way affected by them, since Anglo-Saxon English is no more our English than the Latin Vulgate is Italian. They derive their importance not so much from what they are in themselves, as from the spirit of which they are indications.

It is probable enough that, for the most part, they were produced with the idea of interpreting those parts of the Bible which would most constantly be in use through the Church services. But the Latin Bible still remained the official Bible of the Church, however active the zeal of independent scholars in the sphere of paraphrase or of translation. As being the work of monks or of bishops, such versions would naturally call for no challenge on the part of the ecclesiastical authorities. But the mere fact that these efforts were made at all must be hailed, whatever may have been their use and purpose, as a feature of the times which was full of promise for the future.

They bear witness to us of the high esteem in which the Scriptures were held by the native clergy of the Anglo-Saxon Church, and by the lay friends, too, with whom they may have shared them. And they serve to stud the somewhat gloomy centuries of the Middle Ages in England with literary signposts, beckoning us onward along the track of the vernacular towards the promised land of a complete translation.

Not, however, until the developments necessary for the accomplishment of so great an achievement had matured, could a complete rendering of the Latin Vulgate be made. And when, in the fullness of time, the Wycliffe Bible at length appeared, it appeared not merely as a book, but as an event of nothing less than national significance. For we see reflected in that earliest of our versions the wonderful continuity and persistence which mark not merely the English language, but the English character-a character and a language which neither the harrowing of the Dane, nor the arrogance of the Norman, nor the monasticism of the Italian, has ever been able permanently to suppress, and in whose invincible buoyancy is to be found the main secret of English history. What Horace sang long ago of Rome may well be applied to England:- “Duris ut ilex tonsa bipennibus Nigrae feraci frondis in Algido, Per damna, per coedes ab ipso, Ducit opes animumque ferro.”

Od. iv., 4. “So, ‘mid the dense-leaved forests of Algidus, Mark we the holmoak, lopped by the heartless axe, Turn loss to gain, havoc to healing, Quickened with life by the very iron.” We have now arrived, in our preliminary survey, within sight of the Norman Conquest, and the consequent dethronement of Anglo-Saxon, as a literary language, by Anglo-Norman. Banished from court and castle, from the statute-book and from the school, the native tongue found shelter for a while with the Anglo-Saxon monk, with the parish priest, with the villager, the minstrel, and the friar. It ceased to be a written tongue, and began rapidly therefore both to change in structure and to become restricted in vocabulary. Yet the succession of paraphrases and translations, even under these new circumstances, never wholly ceased.

Early in the thirteenth century a monk of the order of St Augustine-Ormin, or Orm, by name-produced a metrical version of the Gospels and of the Acts, which is known as the Ormulum, and which has fortunately been preserved to us in a manuscript of some 20,000 lines, now numbered among the treasures of the Oxford Bodleian Library. The plan of the work is to paraphrase the Gospel for the day, and to accompany it with a short exposition, composed in the allegorical manner which was then so universally the fashion. The vocabulary is purely Teutonic, but in cadence and in syntax Ormin has evidently been affected by Norman influences. He gives his own justification of his version- “If any one wants to know” (we render his words in modern English) “why I have done this deed, I have done it so that all young Christian folk may depend upon the Gospel only, and may follow with all their might its holy teaching, in thought, and word, and deed.”

In addition to a translation of the Bible into Norman-French, which was due to the University of Paris, and which was in use in Northern France about 1250 A.D., there are many metrical paraphrases and renderings of Scripture, such, for example, as the “Cursor Mundi,” perhaps the best known of them all, the “Salus animae,” or “Sowlehele,” and the “Story of Genesis and Exodus,” which circulated freely in parts of England during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but it is not necessary to detain the reader with them, nor would any mere string of unfamiliar names be of the faintest interest. Some of them were composed, it may be added, for the use not of the conquered Saxon but of his French-speaking conquerors.

It is important, however, to notice that down to the middle of the fourteenth century no literal translation in English prose of any complete book of Scripture had been produced, except in the case of the Psalter, which as speaking the universal language of the human soul has always been the most favourite part of the Bible for devotional use. Of the Psalter itself there are at least two such prose translations, the one made in the South of England, and the other in the North. The former has somewhat doubtfully been ascribed to William of Shoreham, a place near Sevenoaks in Kent. There remain to us some of Shoreham’s poems, and their dialect is Kentish, whereas this Psalter is in the dialect of the West Midlands. The latter we owe to Richard Rolle, who wrote “The Pricke of Conscience,” and is more usually known as “The Hermit of Hampole,” a spot not far from Doncaster in Yorkshire. Their approximate dates are 1320 A.D., and 1340 A.D., and the common original from which both translations are made is the Latin Vulgate. It will be observed that these Psalters bring us down to the age of Wycliffe, who was born in or about the year 1324 A.D.

We may now, therefore, bring this chapter to an end by summing up the main points which have been engaging our attention.

We were led, then, in the, first place, to inquire why it was that, side by side with the progress of our vernacular literature, the Latin Bible and the Latin Liturgy so long retained their place unchallenged. We saw that medieval England was quite unripe for a Bible in the mother tongue, and that while the illiterate majority were in no condition to feel the want of such a book, the educated minority would be averse to the initiation of so great a change.

In the next place it was pointed out that the open Bible was not really what the age required; that the tendency of the Church-ritual was to throw the written word into the background; that religion was presented mainly in a pictorial and ceremonial form, and that the moral teaching of the Scriptures lay hidden away under a strange amalgam of allegory and legend.

Furthermore, we found that the work of a missionary church was primarily concerned with conduct and discipline, and not with either theology or literature. From these considerations it seemed necessarily to follow, that, if the contents of the Bible were to be in any measure brought home to the artisans and peasantry of Anglo-Saxon England, it must be by means of agencies other than that of dumb parchments. Such agencies we observed to have been in fact at work in the preaching of the local