Our Bible : how it has come to us
Talbot, Reginald Thomas, 1862-1935
BLi€ anon Talbot ^& .\'-2., 14- {SS^ ^'fc^ ^i m ^^fol<fsi(at j^ %/ PRINCETON, N. J. %. ^^« Presented by Dr. T, L .Po\^^oin. Section VdX' / OUR BIBLE HOW IT HAS COME TO US OUR BIBLE HOW IT HAS COME TO US BY THE REV. R. T. TALBOT M.A. HONORARY CANON OF DURHAM CATHEDRAL AND LECTURER IN CHURCH HISTORY AND DOCTRINE IN THE DIOCESES OF DURHAM, RIPON, AND NEWCASTLE NEW YORK THOMAS WHITTAKER 2 & 3 BIBLE HOUSE 1894 PREFACE The following papers were originally contributed to the ''Sunday Magazine.'' The author has simply sought to make some of the facts in the history of the descent of the Bible accessible to those who have more desire to know than leisure to read; and if the book can make no pretence to original research, it may at least claim the merit of fairly representing the conclusions of the latest scholarship. R. T. r. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE I. THE BIBLE BEFORE THE DAYS OF PRINTING ... 9 II. ENGLISH TRANSLATORS UP TO THE TIME OF WYCLIFFE 35 III. ENGLISH TRANSLATORS UP TO THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY 57 IV. THE LAST TRANSLATION 8l V. THE COLLECTION OF THE BOOKS OF THE BIBLE . . 103 THE BIBLE BEFORE THE DAYS OF PRINTING THE BIBLE BEFORE THE DAYS OF PRINTING x^M HE subject of our first paper is the history Lm\ of the manuscripts of the Bible. As it is always well to begin quite at the beginning of a subject, we will ask — What does the word ** manuscript " mean? It means that which is written by hand. The word manuscript refers us back beyond the fifteenth century, and introduces us to the region of time wherein the printer and his art were unknown. It is only 450 years ago that printing with movable types was discovered. The Dutch claim the honour of discovery for their countryman Lau- rens Coster, and the Germans for their own Johann Gutenberg. The question may be OUR BIBLE amicably settled by allowing a simultaneous discovery on the part of the Dutchman and the German. At all events, it was just about the middle of the fifteenth century that what an old German writer calls the " almost divine benefit " of the printing-press was conferred upon mankind. A generation later, in 1476, our own William Caxton set up his press, under the patronage of the Abbot Esteney, in the almonry of Westminster Abbey. The invention of printing brought about a peaceful, but complete revolution. Knowledge stepped forth from the cloister and entered into the market-place. Manuscripts had been for the few, the printed page would be for the many. No Franchise Bill has ever placed so much power in the hands of the many as did the invention of printing. For knowledge is power, and the pathway to knowledge, which hitherto in the days of manuscripts had been open only to the few, was now by printing being opened to all alike. The Bible, like all other ancient books, was transmitted in manuscripts until the age of printing. Let us try and gather together a HOW IF HAS COME TO US 13 few facts which will help us to understand how it fared with the Bible in the days of manu- scripts. First as to the Old Testament Hebrew manuscripts. It is a strange fact that none of those which have come into our hands are very ancient. The bulk of those we have are not much older than the date of our Norman Conquest, and there are only a few which are a little older still. Various explanations have been given to account for the comparatively modern date of the manuscripts which we possess. One of these is as follows. The Hebrew manuscripts had become faulty in the lapse of centuries, and various attempts were made to correct the text. The most famous revision of the text was executed in the Jewish schools at Tiberias, on the Lake of Galilee, at some time subsequent to the sixth Christian century. The various existing types of text were then collected and compared by Jewish scholars. A corrected text was issued which, under the name of the Massoretic text, became the standard authoritative text. It is probable that the earlier and less correct copies passed out of use and 14 OUR BIBLE were destroyed. When a corrected text had been given to the world, there was no use in preserving an imperfect text ; indeed, the sooner the latter was put out of the way the better for everybody. Another explanation is that the Hebrew manuscripts of the Old Testament were never in circulation as were the manuscripts of the New Testament. There were pubHc copies in use in the synagogues and elsewhere, but few were in private hands. Moreover, owing to the peculiar reverence of the Jews for the written word of Scripture, when a public copy could no longer be used, it was solemnly immured in the synagogue wall. Manuscripts of the Old Testa- ment were, therefore, always few in number, and of those few as each in turn became past service, it was put beyond the reach of any subsequent antiquarian research. Nobody, of course, ever doubts that there must have been manuscripts of the Old Testament existing in each century before the eleventh century a.d. ; and stretching backwards in a long chain to our Lord's day, and further backwards again. In support of this we may call to remembrance HOW IT HAS COME TO US the interesting history of a translation of the Old Testament which was made about two centuries before the Christian era. This was the translation into Greek called the Septuagint translation or translation of the Seventy. The way the name arose was as follows. Long after the translation became current, a story of its origin was invented to give it an added renown. It was said that one of the Ptolemies who reigned in Egypt was anxious to have a copy of the Old Testament in Greek, the language chiefly spoken in his capital city, Alexandria. This book was destined for a place in the great library of the Alexandrian Museum, of which the Ptolemies were munificent patrons. Seventy men were sent from Jerusalem to Alexandria, and provided with all the requisite materials. The scholars were shut up in seventy separate cells on the island of Pharos in the Alexandrian harbour, under the shadow of the famous old-world lighthouse. Their labours over, the Jewish doctors were Hberated, and it was then discovered that each translator, although he had worked independently, had used the very same words as the rest of his fellows, and that 1 6 OUR BIBLE a perfect unanimity of expression ran through the work of all. Such is the legend which, in spite of its unhistorical character, we must needs remember, because it accounts for the name Septuagint (meaning ^' seventy "), the name of the earliest translation of the Old Testament. The real facts of the case are these. When Alexandria, the memorial city of Alexander the Great, was founded about three centuries before the time of Christ a determined effort was made, in pursuance of the policy of Alexander, to bring representatives of various nationalities together into one cosmopolitan city. Hither came a considerable colony of Jews, who took firm root and found, as elsewhere, among a Gentile population, a magnificent field for the exercise of their peculiar commercial genius. Living in a city where Greek was generally spoken, they would perforce come to use Greek in their dealings with their neighbours, and their native tongue would fall into disuse. Liv- ing also among idolaters, the Jews would find themselves often called upon to give a reason for their abstinence from idolatry. 'What more natural than that a translation of the Hebrew HOW IT HAS COME TO US 17 Scripture into their adopted language, Greek, should have been called for by this colony of Israelites ? The translation appears to have been done bit by bit between the third and second century. Some parts of the work are better done than others. The best translated portion is the Pentateuch. It must of course be remembered that we have no manuscripts of the Septuagint existing now older than the fourth century A.d. ; but there is every reason to believe the statement that the original manuscripts belonged to a period not earlier than the second century b.c, and we may believe that the text of the Septua- gint has not undergone any substantial alteration between that time and the time of the earliest existing copy. If we look for a moment at the text of the Septuagint, it does not present us with a narrative precisely the same as that which we have in our existing Hebrew manu- script, but it is sufficiently like to make us feel that there must have been Hebrew manuscripts at least two centuries before the time of Christ, of the same general character and telling the same history in substance as do those Hebrew B i8 OUR BIBLE manuscripts of a much later date which are in our possession. Thus it will appear that the Septuagint enables us to build a bridge from the eleventh century a.d. to the second century b.c, across which the substance of Old Testament history travels safely. If the manuscripts of the Old Testament have not been corrupted in any really important degree during that long period, we may reasonably suppose that the Old Testament manuscripts prior to the second century B.C. enjoyed a similar immunity. How much farther back we may place the first manuscripts of the Old Testament we can- not say with certainty. The question is too intricate and too technical for us to deal with here. It is, however, worth recording that the accuracy of the historical statements of the Old Testament receive a great deal of confirma- tion from the independent witness of heathen monuments. Professor Say ce has said, **Where- ever the Biblical history comes into contact with that of its powerful neighbours, and this can be tested by contemporaneous monuments of HOW IT HAS COME TO US 19 Egypt and Assyria-Babylonia, it is confirmed even in the smallest details." Let us turn now to the manuscripts of the New Testament — i.e., copies of the New Testa- ment in the original tongue — viz., Greek. There are already discovered close upon eighteen hundred manuscripts of the New Testament, in whole or part. This large mass of manuscript evidence is assigned to very various dates. Some of it is as old as the fourth century of our era, and some of it as late as the time of printing. The older manuscripts are called Uncials, and the more modern, Cursives. The Uncials get their name from the style of lettering in vogue up to about the eighth century. This lettering was of a large kind, and all the letters were formed the same in size ; as the letters were about an inch long (in Latin, icncia = inch), the manuscripts in which this lettering is found are called Uncials. The more modern manuscripts exhibit a different kind of lettering which goes by the name of cursive, or running-hand writing, and the manu- scripts themselves take the generic name of Cursives. OUR BIBLE The manuscripts most sought after and most highly valued are those copied nearest to the Apostohc period. These are Uncial manuscripts, and the three most important belong to the fourth and fifth centuries. But sometimes a comparatively modern Cursive, which nevertheless may have been copied from an early Uncial now lost, ranks equal in value with an old Uncial. The three oldest Uncials, curiously enough, belong to the three great divisions of Christendom, — viz., Anglican, Roman and Greek. The youngest of these three seniors is Codex A, commonly called the Alexandrian manuscript. It was copied by some scribe in the fifth century. In the year 1628, it was presented by Cyril Lucar, the patriarch of Constantinople, to Charles I. It is now the property of the British nation, and reposes in the home of many national treasures, the British Museum. Along with the New Testament is bound up the Greek translation of the Old Testament, the famous Septuagint. The manuscript is not complete ; there are ten leaves missing from the Old, and thirty from the New Testament. Codex B, a manuscript of the New Testament, belonging / 7/0 1 r IT HAS COME TO US 21 to the fourth century, has lain for the last five hundred years in the Papal residence at Rome, called the Vatican Palace, and hence is known as the Vatican manuscript. It is a volume of over seven hundred leaves of the finest vellum, about a foot square. Part of the Greek trans- lation of the Old Testament has been lost, and there is none of the New Testament left after Hebrews ix. 14. Codex Aleph, called the Sinaitic manu- script, was discovered in 1859 by the Ger- man scholar. Dr. Tischendorf, in the neigh- bourhood of Mount Sinai. The story of its finding is a veritable romance of history. In 1844, Dr Tischendorf was travelling in the East, on the look out for rare and precious manuscripts. In the May of that year, he c^me to the convent of St. Catherine, at the foot of Mount Sinai. Here at the foot of that mountain, so intimately connected with the Old Testament, he was to find the most complete copy of the New Testament. The convent was inhabited by monks belonging to the Greek Church. These monks were the degenerate descendants of that noble race 22 OUR BIBLE of monks of an earlier date, who had rendered such signal service to Biblical knowledge. Tischendorf noticed in the convent hall a basket of parchments, and he was told that two heaps of similar old manuscripts had already fed the fire. Looking into the basket the German scholar discovered several sheets of a copy of the Septuagint of an extremely ancient character. He was allowed to take forty sheets, but when he unwarily expressed his delight, and pressed for more material of the same kind, he aroused the envious suspicions of the monks, and met with a stubborn refusal. Tischendorf came home to Germany, and acquainted the literary world with his *' find." He spoke only in a general way about the whereabouts of the place where he had found so much, and hoped some day to find still more. He wished to keep his secret to himself, and so he said vaguely that "somewhere in the East " was the scene of his discovery. There- upon the English Government sent out experts to search in the East for manuscripts, but at length they returned home empty-handed, and HOW IT HAS COME TO US 23 Tischendorf was relieved to think that no one had forestalled him. For fifteen long years the German scholar tried to put himself into a position from which he could success- fully assail the selfish cupidity of the monks of Mount Sinai. At length, in 1859, having obtained the patronage of the Czar Alexander, he revisited the monastery. He came, armed with an imperial order from the temporal head of the Greek Church, which the Doctor thought would carry weight with the Greek monks. But he was mistaken. The monks remained unmoved, and Tischendorf seemed still far enough off from the attainment of his cherished hope. It was the evening before his departure, and he walked with the steward of the convent in the grounds. The monk called him into his cell to partake of some refreshment. When the two were together and the door was closed — ^^ I, too," said the steward, ^'have read a copy of that Septuagint." With these words he took down a bundle wrapped in red cloth and laid it upon the table. It is a natural question to ask. What has become of the manuscripts of the New Tes- HOW IT HAS COME TO US 25 tament before the fourth century ? There is every reason to suppose that the Vatican and Sinaitic manuscripts are only descendants of a considerable line of New Testament manuscripts stretching back to Apostolic times. But at present we do not know of any manuscript which represents the text of the New Testament in the intervening period between the first and the fourth century. It may at first sight seem very strange that the manuscripts of the earlier period have not been preserved. But we must take some things into account. Probably the earlier copies of the New Testament were written upon papyrus, a material notoriously liable to fall to pieces in course of time, unless preserved with extraordinary care. There is no reason to suppose that the earlier generations of Christians looked upon their manuscripts in the light of possible evidences and witnesses to the truth of Christianity to be used by a later generation. As soon as copies had had their day they were recopied, and then the older copy naturally disappeared. It would not be out of place to recall the fact that the 26 OUR BIBLE first three centuries being centuries during which the Church was persecuted were not well calculated to preserve such perishable material as manuscripts. One of the objects of the persecutors was to burn up Christian manu- scripts. Gildas, a British historian, talks about the piles of manuscripts which were burned in British towns during persecutions of the third century, and one who was in another part of the world, living at the very time in question, the historian Eusebius, bears witness from his own observation of this very practice. We know that weak and cowardly Christians earned the title of traditores — traitors — because they gave up the manu- scripts which their brethen used in order to gain exemption from punishment. This must be taken into account along with other facts as helping to supply a reason for what at first sight seems a strange lack of manuscripts of the New Testament earlier than the fourth century. By comparison with other ancient books the wealth of manuscript evidence for the New Testament is stupendous. The great histories of antiquity have their text founded HOW IT HAS COME TO US 27 upon such few and such late manuscripts that we may fairly say that, in comparison with them, the Bible is founded upon a rock. Of Herodotus there are only fifteen manuscripts and none older than the tenth century a.d. The oldest manuscript of Thucydides is of the eleventh century. The first six books of the Annals of Tacitus are only known to us through a single manuscript which came to light in the fifteenth century, and which is far removed from the days of Tacitus. Thus has time dealt with the precious works of Greece and Rome ; who will not regard with wonder and thankfulness the sight of one work of a remote antiquity which has escaped the destroyer's hand to such a marvellous extent, and has witnesses to its text very many, and not a few very ancient ? But to the foregoing something further may be added. It may be said, "Well, the case for the New Testament may not be so desperate as for some of the classical histories, but we want some more definite assurance about the text of the New Testament than this. Is there any indication of manuscripts similar in OUR BIBLE general character to those which we possess of the fourth century, existing in previous centuries nearer the ApostoHc period ? The answer is, " Yes, there are indications." In the second century translations of the New Testament were made into Latin, Coptic, and Syriac. No doubt the text of these versions has suffered a little by transcription, but we may take them in their present form as fairly representing the original Latin and other versions which were undoubtedly made in the second century. These versions tell us sub- stantially the same story as our manuscripts of the fourth century ; and, therefore, they carry us back two centuries behind our Sinaitic and Vatican texts to a time when translations were made from manuscripts of a generally similar character. Indications, moreover, are not want- ing which reveal to a trained eye that the second century versions must have been trans- lated from manuscripts which even at that early time were not new. but had come of a line of manuscripts of which they may well have been descendants, with an ancestry of three generations back, making them HOW IT HAS COME TO US 29 representative of the text of the Apostolic age. Apart from this line of evidence is another which makes use of the frequent Scriptural quotations in the early Christian Fathers. The quotations of the Fathers of the second and third centuries from manuscripts extant in their days though not in ours, often supply us with valuable confirmatory evidence as to the ex- istence in a previous period of a type of text substantially like that of the fourth century. The Bible as we hold it in our hand to-day is a book that we know has come down to us through ages in which we find it at first hard to believe that it can have remained uncorrupted. We look more carefully and we find springing up on all sides in remote centuries witnesses direct and indirect to its freedom from textual error in any point of real importance. It has, of course, suffered in some minor and un- important details ; but even here very often a skilled workman can see what the original pattern was and restore it. The book comes to us through the centuries Hke some knight of old making his way through the fight. His OUR BIBLE y shield is dinted, his sword notched, his breast- plate beaten, his helmet scarred, but the man within is as full of life as when he went into the battle. So it is with the Bible. It bears upon it the marks of the relentless hand of Time and of his ministers. But those marks are upon the outside casque, not upon the inward spiritual being. The life of the book is still unimpaired, and it is still instinct with a ^' quickening spirit." There are two points about manuscript work which we ought to notice : (i) the slowness of it and (2) the necessary inaccuracy of it. The first point will be well understood by taking an illus- tration. At Ferrara, a town in the north of Italy, there is a manuscript copy of the Old Testament. A note at the close proclaims the copyist to have been one ** Nicodemus the stranger." It is he himself who informs us that he began his task on June 8, 1334, and finished it in the same year, July 15, "working very hard." Nicodemus evidently felt proud of his work. To copy the whole Old Testament in five weeks was indeed a tour de force. But how painfully HOW IT HAS COME TO US slow is the quickest piece of handwriting compared with the performances of the printing- press. And now we may notice the second point. Not only is printing a much quicker, but it is also a much more accurate method of reproducing written matter. The press is certainly capable of mistakes, and there are printer's errors as well as clerical errors. For instance, a printed Bible has a curious error in Psalm cxix., which makes the writer exclaim : '* Printers have persecuted me without a cause " ; and, again, it is in a printed Bible of 1653 that the omission of a small but important word causes us to read the startling statement : *' Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the Kingdom 01 God ? " Yet, in carefully edited books, printer's errors are the exception, and not the rule ; and, moreover, there is no chance of fresh errors coming in by the multiplication of copies. But the method of making manuscripts opens the door to many kinds of errors, and the oftener copies are made, the greater is the chance of the multiplication of errors. Before we consider this point farther, let us say something about the human instrument V 32 OUR BIBLE who is responsible for the Bible manuscripts. The Old Testament was copied by a pro- fessional copyist, known as a Scribe. In the time of Hezekiah a great impetus seems to have been given to the dihgent copying of the Law, and it would appear that from this period dates the institution of the Scribes as guardians, expounders, and copyists of the Law of Moses. As to the first copies of the Gospels, and other books of the New Testament, we do not know by whose hand they were done. But such ancient copies of the New Testament as have survived the lapse of centuries were the handiwork of a public servant, sometimes not fully appreciated — the monk. Writing materials of many different kinds have been in use in various ages and countries — such as stone, clay cylinders, tree- bark, and waxed tablets. But the most widely used writing material for several centuries before the time of Christ was papyrus. This distant precursor of paper was made by the Egyptians, first of all, out of the pith of the papyrus reed. It is this plant which, under the name of bulrush, appears in the story of the HOW IT HAS COME TO US infancy of Moses, as told in our English Bible. It is very likely that the earhest copies of the Gospels and Epistles were made on this papyrus. We cannot say this with certainty, for such ancient copies of the New Testament as we possess come to us from the fourth century, when another material was used. This, when made from the skin of young calves, was called vellum ; and when made from the skin of sheep or goats, parchment. The ink used for the New Testament manuscripts was made of soot or lampblack mixed with either wine-lees or gum. The pen which was used upon the softer papyrus was a reed, but the harder vellum or parchment required a metal pen or stylus. Nothing is more wonderful than the way in which the oldest copies of the New Testament have borne the test of time. There are, for instance, two over which not much less than 1500 years have passed, and yet they are still clear, fresh, and legible. The original copyist must have worked well to execute such enduring work. The first word in speaking about manuscripts of the Bible must be a word c 34 OUR BIBLE of unstinted praise for the copyist. But, at the same time, there is no use in denying that he often made errors in his work. The copyist was not infallible, and his work was not, in the order of divine providence, exempted from the chances of corruption which attend upon all such work as his. The copyist was human, and could not but fail now and again. His eye grew wearied, his mind wandered, the manuscript from which he copied puzzled him ; " the spirit, indeed," was " willing, but the flesh " was " weak." But, happily for us, although the Bible did undoubtedly suffer a good deal in the puriiy of its text before the days of printing, it has not suffered in such a way as to put the meaning of the original writers in any serious jeopardy. The variations in the different manuscripts do not as a rule affect the sense of the passages in which they occur. They do not '' extinguish the light of any one chapter, nor so disguise Christianity, but that every feature of it will be still the same." ENGLISH TRANSLATORS UP TO THE TIME OF WYCLIFFE ENGLISH TRANSLATORS UP TO THE TIME OF WYCLIFFE /^te'N our previous paper we said something ^1 about the Bible before the days of printing, and were chiefly concerned with it in its original languages of Hebrew and Greek. Now we shall say a little about some of the steps in the history of the translation of the Bible into our own tongue. The word transla- tion means the act of carrying across. Between us and a book written in a foreign tongue there is an impassable gulf fixed. We want some one to whom the gulf is not impassable, who will do a translation, a carrying across, of the meaning for us. Such a person is called a translator. The history of the translation of the Bible into English is a long and interesting record which carries us from the fountain-head right away down the broadening stream of English national life to the present time. 38 OUR BIBLE The first inhabitants of our country belonged to the great Celtic nation. Among the Celtic population, dominated by the Roman army of occupation, the Church of Christ was founded in the close of the second century. For two centuries and a half the British Church con- tinued to increase, and before long it came to occupy an honoured position amongst the national Churches of the West. There is a faint tradition of a version of the Scriptures among the Celts in the vernacular; but the report is too uncertain to command much attention. At the commencement of the fifth century the Roman garrison was withdrawn in order to prop up the tottering throne of Honorius. Then began the troubles of Britain. Old enemies reappeared and ravaged the coast line. These came from Schleswig, Jutland, and Holstein, from the region at the mouth of the Elbe, and from the Baltic shores. The people were Angles, Jutes, and Saxons, who either found their own homes too strait, or were simply led by the love of adventure and conquest. The Romans had managed to keep them from doing much harm in their piratical expeditions. But now the Romans HOW IT HAS COME TO US 39 were gone and there was no more a Count of the Saxon shore guarding the seaboard from the Wash to Southampton Water. We all re- member how, in the middle of the fifth century, the Angles and Saxons became, for the moment, allies of the Britons against the Picts, who lived in the Scotch Highlands. But soon the allies were on the offensive against their former friends. Slowly and doggedly the fight was fought out. What though Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table did great feats of arms, and though the Britons fought bravely for hearth and home, they were in the end thoroughly defeated, and only kept a foothold in Wales and Cornwall. To these retreats the Christian religion and the Christian church was relegated for a century and a half. The gods which are commemorated in the names of our days of the week — these gods alone were worshipped for many generations in England. But towards the close of the sixth century, partly by the agency of British evangelists from the north and partly by the agency of Italian missionaries who worked in the south-east of England, the heathen Angles and Saxons embraced Christianity. By the 40 OUR BIBLE middle of the seventh century the Church had attained to uniformity, and thus, prior to the unity of the kingdom, for as yet England was politically a divided house, we get sight of a pattern of unity in the Church of England. Churches, like individuals, follow somewhat the fashion of the day. And, if these fashions are harmless, there is no reason why they should not. In the seventh century the fashion was to preserve the Bible in Latin. This was the language of the educated world. To put so difficult a book as the Bible into the hands of the uneducated seemed unwise. If the people were taught the chief contents of the Bible that was considered enough. The unlearned must take those things from the lips of the learned, and must not cause themselves to "stumble at the word." And yet in Old England before the Conquest there was a longing in some quarters to have at least portions of the Bible in the popular tongue, and this was answered, by some notable attempts at translation. The story of the English Bible begins with Caedmon of Whitby in 670. More than twelve centuries ago a lady of royal blood and truly HOW IT HAS COME TO US 41 royal spirit reared an abbey on the dark clifl's of Whitby, in Yorkshire. She had built before this a similar house at Hartlepool, on the Tees. The lady's name was Hilda. Of her the historian Bede says : *' Her prudence was so great that not only did ordinary persons, but even sometimes kings and princes, seek and receive counsel of her in their necessities." We are also told that " she made those who were under her direction give much time to the read- ing of the divine Scriptures ; " and this encour- agement of Biblical stud}^ had its far-reaching results by which she "being dead yet speaketh." For — and now we shall use the exact words of Bede — " in the monastery of this abbess was a certain brother especially marked by divine grace, since he was wont to make songs suited to religion and piety, so that whatever he had learnt from the divine writings through inter- preters, this he in a little while produced in poetical expressions composed with the greatest harmony and accuracy, in his own tongue, that is, in that of the Angles. By his songs the minds of many were excited to contemn the world and desire the celestial life. And, indeed, 42 OUR BIBLE others also after him, in the nation of the Angles, attempted to compose religious poems, but none could ever equal him. For he himself did not learn the art of poetry from man, or by being instructed by man, but, being divinely assisted, received gratuitously the gift of singing, on which account he never could compose any frivolous or idle poem, but those only Avhich pertain to religion suited his religious tongue. For having lived in the secular habit unto the time of advanced age, he had never learned anything of singing. Whence, sometimes at an entertainment, when it was determined for the sake of mirth that all should sing in order, he, when he saw the harp approaching him, used to rise in the midst of the supper, and, having gone out, walk back to his home. Which when he was doing on a time, and, having left the house of entertainment, had gone out to the stables of the beasts of burden, the care of which was entrusted to him on that night, and then at the proper hour had resigned his limbs to sleep, a certain one stood by him in a dream, who, saluting him and calling him by his name, said, * Caedmon, sing me something.' Then he HOW IT HAS COME TO US 43 answering said, ' I know not how to sing ; and for that reason I went out from the entertain- ment and retired hither because I could not sing.' Again he who was talking with him said, ' Yet you have something to sing to me.' ' What/ said he, ' must I sing ? ' The other said, ' Sing me the beginning of created things.' Having received this reply he immediately began to sing verses in praise of God the Creator, which he had never heard. On his rising up from sleep he retained in memory all that he had sung in his dream, and presently added to it more words of song worthy of God, and after the same fashion." The matter came to the ears of Hilda through the convent steward. The cowherd was accord- ingly received in audience of many learned men, and, after hearing him, all concluded '' that a celestial gift had been granted him by the Lord." Csedmon now left the secular habit and took the monastic vow, and was instructed by the brethren in the whole course of sacred history. But one, far better known than Caedmon, laboured as a translator, and died in his labours, some sixty-five years later, namely, the Venerable Bede, the great Northumbrian scholar. When he was seven years old he was placed in the monastery on the north bank of the Wear, where now Monkwearmouth stands, and a little later, when Benedict Biscop had built the sister monastery at Jarrow, Bede left Wearside for Tyneside. At Jarrow, Bede lived a happy and useful life. He never ventured far from his home on the Tyne, but he travelled far and wide HOW IT HAS COME TO US 45 in the world of literature and science. " The whole learning of the time," says the historian Green, ''seemed to be summed up in him." " He was the father," said Edmund Burke, " of English learning." His " Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation," from which I quoted the story of Csedmon, is a unique authority. One of our latest historians, speaking of our earliest annalist, says, '' All that we really know of the century and a half that follows the landing of Augustine we know from him." The dearest work he undertook was commenting upon and preaching from the Holy Scriptures. The last offering of his powers which he made to God was a translation of the Gospel of St. John. Death summoned him before his work was well done, but he would not heed the summons until he had quite finished his task. '' I don't want my boys to read a lie," he said, alluding to his young pupils and his unfinished work, '' or to work to no purpose after I am gone." It is one of Bede's dear '' boys " who tells us of the closing scene, with many tender touches. ''Our father and master, whom God loved, had translated the Gospel of St. John as far as 'what are these 46 OUR BIBLE among so many,' when the day came before our Lord's Ascension." It was the year 735. " He then began to suffer much in his breath and a swelling came in his feet, but he went on dictating to his scribe. If Caedmon is the father of English poetry, we may revere in Bede the father of English prose. It is difficult to gain a certain knowledge of the doings of King Alfred, Tradition has been busy with the character and achievements of the great patriot king. But perhaps we shall not be wrong in claiming Alfred as one in the great company of English translators of the Bible. At least it is well ascertained that Alfred •' took the English tongue, and made it the tongue in which 48 OUR BIBLE history, philosophy, law, and religion spoke to the English people." Two contributions to Bible translation are claimed for Alfred, (i) A trans- lation of the Ten Commandments attached to the statutes of the time. (2) A translation of some of the Psalms. Alfred's admiration for the Psalms is worth remembering. In the early days of outlawry it is said that he would read the Psalms in a Latin manuscript which he car- ried with him over the camp fire when the toils of the day were done. When at length he came to an established throne he did not forget those earlier days or the words which had come home to him in the time of trouble and rebuke. The result was a translation of some of the Psalms. It is touching to think of those Psalms which have ministered to the joys and pains of so many millions in England alone, not to speak of other countries, as having been the cordial which revived the drooping spirits of one of our earliest and greatest kings. And ere we leave the old Saxon England there is yet one more translator over whose work we may pause a moment. ^Elfric the grammarian, a monk of Winchester, translated HOW IT HAS COME TO US 49 portions of the Bible, about the year 1023, into English. The work was animated by a patriotic purpose. Of his version of Joshua the grammarian says : " This book I turned into English for Ealdorman Ethelward, a book that a prince might study in times of invasion and turbulence." Of the Book of Judith, which he also translated, he says: ''Englished according to my skill, for your example, that you may also defend your country by force of arms against the outrage of foreign hosts." The previous period closed, in the foreboding words of iElfric, ominous of blood and battle. This our second period fulfils the monk's presage of " invasion and turbulence and the outrage of foreign hosts." Just as six hundred years before Saxons, Jutes and Angles, with their strange tongue, had come in upon the then inhabitants of Britain, so now the Normans came down upon the country where Briton, Saxon, Angle, and Dane were struggling to- gether, and added one more element which would contribute, when the process of fusion was over, its own peculiar flavour and colour to the resultant of all these forces — the English p so OUR BIBLE kingdom, the English people, the Enghsh tongue. Once again, in the case of the Norman invasion as in the case of the previous invasions of Roman, Saxon, Dane, the pains of death and of birth racked the land. What was customary and familiar and established died, and a new order struggled painfully, with sharp crying, into Hfe. But death-throes and birth-pangs were but the prelude to what now we see was the divine event — the welding of the peoples into a homogeneous whole, bringing with it a national consciousness, a national speech, and a national ideal. But to all human seeming heavy and fatal was the blow of the Conqueror's successful invasion. To use the apt language of Isaiah, it was the inroad of " a fierce people, a people of a deep speech that thou canst not perceive, of a strange tongue that thou canst not understand." The Normans came speaking French. They flooded town and court and castle with their own people ; the bishoprics of the Church were filled by French-speaking ecclesiastics, who did not sympathise with the conquered people. But the strength of England lay not in its HOW IT HAS COME TO US 51 towns, but in its villages. To them we owe it that in the end French became incorporated with Saxon, and not Saxon with French. At the first moment of defeat daring spirits like Hereward rose in armed revolt among the fens of Lincoln- shire ; others of similar disposition wandered as far as Constantinople, and served as mercenaries of the Eastern empire ; and a fraction of the more reckless, of whom Robin Hood is the representative, fled to forests, like that of Sherwood, and lived an outlaw life under the greenwood tree. But the people (who numbered not more than two millions) as a whole submitted to the Normans. They had never been " more than hewers of wood and drawers of water" under their own native rulers, and to obey the Norman made Httle or no difference to their condition. But while the}^ had no objection to changing one master for another, they would not change one tongue for another. Norman French was the language of the invading army, and therefore of the ruling class ; it was used in the courts of justice and in all matters of state ; but the people still held to the tongue wherein they OUR BIBLE were born. In 1204, one hundred and thirty- eight years after the Conquest, Normandy was lost for ever as a permanent appendage to England, and one result was that this island became more and more a home to the Normans, and French became more and more of a foreign tongue to them. ''EngUsh had not only survived, but was spreading itself through the upper classes. Norman children could not be kept from learning it ; and the higher ranks, being a minority, felt the necessity of acquiring it. By the end of the thirteenth century English seems to have become the mother tongue of the aristocracy, their chil- dren being taught French as a foreign language, and as an accomplishment befitting their rank." And year by year the English tongue developed and enriched on this hand and on that, drew on to its golden age to be the high instrument for high thoughts. One great stage in its growth is marked by Geoffrey Chaucer, at the close of the fourteenth century, and his *' Canterbury Tales." The latent powers of English ^* pure and undefiled " are manifested as the vehicle of a most exquisite power of story-telling, and we feel that this is the earnest of greater things to HOW IT HAS COME TO US 53 come. But we cannot tarry to link our subject further with its contemporary literature. For we have come now to the age of Wycliffe and his Bible. The events which lead to Chaucer's English lead also to that of Wycliffe, and in all probability by a few years Wycliffe's Bible can claim priority over Chaucer's work as the first great monument of really English literature. 