Chapter III: The Bible, and Other Reflections

I have just been listening to another very eloquent sermon from Dr. Hugh Black, whom I mention elsewhere in this book (see Chapter V). Nearly all these Presbyterians are eloquent, because they don’t write their sermons.

The one slip our eloquent friend made in his sermon was in saying that the _A.D._ 1611 edition of the Bible (the Authorised Version) was a better version of the Bible than the Great Bible of _A.D._ 1539, which according to the front page is stated to be as follows:--

“The byble in English that is to say the content of all
the Holy Scripture both of the old and new testament truly
translated after the verity of the Hebrew and Greek texts by
the diligent study of diverse excellent learned men expert in
the aforesaid tongues.

“Printed by Richard Grafton and Edward Whitchurch. Cum
privilegio ad imprimendum solum.

1539.”

It is true, as the preacher said, that the 1611 edition, the Authorised Version, is more the literal translation of the two, but those “diverse excellent learned men” translated according to the spirit and not the letter of the original; and our dear brother (the preacher) this morning in his address had to acknowledge that in the text he had chosen from the 27th Psalm and the last verse thereof, the pith and marrow which he rightly seized on--being the words “Wait on the Lord”--were more beautifully rendered in the great Bible from which (the Lord be thanked!) the English Prayer Book takes its Psalms, and which renders the original Hebrew not in the literal words, “Wait on the Lord,” but “_Tarry thou the Lord’s leisure_,” and goes on also in far better words than the Authorised Version with the rest of the verse: “Be strong and He shall comfort thine heart.”

When we remonstrated with the Rev. Hugh Black after his sermon, he again gainsaid, and increased his heinousness by telling us that the word “Comfort,” which doesn’t appear in the 1611 version, was in its ancient signification a synonym for “Fortitude”; and the delightful outcome of it is that that is really the one and only proper prayer--to ask for Fortitude or _Endurance_. You have no right to pray for rain for your turnips, when it will ruin somebody else’s wheat. You have no right to ask the Almighty--in fact, He can’t do it--to make two and two into five. The only prayer to pray is for Endurance, or Fortitude. The most saintly man I know, daily ended his prayers with the words of that wonderful hymn:

“Renew my will from day to day,
Blend it with thine, and take away
All that now makes it hard to say,
Thy will be done.”

It must not be assumed that I am a Saint in any way in making these remarks, but only a finger-post pointing the way. The finger-post doesn’t go to Heaven itself, yet it shows the way. All I want to do is to stick up for those holy men who were not hide-bound with a dictionary, and gave us the spirit of the Holy Word and not the Dictionary meaning.

Here I feel constrained to mention a far more beautiful illustration of the value of those pious men of old.

In Brother Black’s 1611 version, the most famous of the Saviour’s words: “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden and I will give you rest,” is, in the 1539 version, “I will _refresh_ you!” There is no _rest_ this side of Heaven. Job (iii, 17) explains Heaven as “Where the wicked cease from troubling and where the weary be at rest.” The fact is--the central point is reached by the Saviour when He exemplifies the Day of Perfection by saying: “In that day ye shall ask me nothing.”

I have been told by a great scientist that for the tide to move a pebble on the beach a millionth of an inch further would necessitate an alteration in the whole Creation. And then we go and pray for rain, or to beat our enemies!

Again, I say--The only thing to pray for is _Endurance_.

Some people in sore straits try to strike bargains with God, if only He will keep them safe or relieve them in the present necessity. It’s a good story of the soldier who, with all the shells exploding round him was heard to pray: “O Lord, if You’ll only get me out of this d--d mess I will be good, I will be good!”

I am reminded of what I call the “Pith and Marrow” which the pious men put at the head of every chapter of the Bible, and which, alas! has been expunged in the literary exactitudes of the Revised Version. Regard Chapter xxvi, for instance, of Proverbs--how it is all summed up by those “diverse excellent learned men.” They wrote at the top of the chapter “Observations about Fools.” Matthew xxii: the Saviour “_Poseth_ the Pharisees.” Isaiah xxi: “The _set_ time.” Isaiah xxvii (so true and pithy of the Chapter!): “Chastisements differ from Judgments”; and in Mark xv: “The Clamour of the Common People”--descriptive of what’s in the chapter. All these headings, in my opinion, as regards those ancient translators, are for them a “Crown of Glory and a Diadem of Beauty”; and I have a feeling that, when they finished their wondrous studies, it was with them as Solomon said, “The desire accomplished is sweet to the Soul.”

DR. GINSBURG

_March 27th, 1918._

DEAR FRIEND,

When I was at Bath I read in the local paper a beautiful letter
aptly alluding to the Mount Fiesole of Bath and quoting what
has been termed that mysterious verse of David’s:

“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills----.”

Well! the other day a great friend of that wonderful Hebrew
scholar, Dr. Ginsburg--he died long since at Capri--told
me that Ginsburg had said to him that all the Revisers and
Translators had missed a peculiar Hebraism which quite alters
the signification of this opening verse of the 121st Psalm: It
should read:

“_Shall_ I lift up mine eyes to those hills? DOTH my help come
from thence?”

And this is the explanation:

Those hills alluded to were the hills in which were the Groves planted in honour of the idols towards which Israel had strayed. So in the second verse the inspired tongue says:

“No! My help cometh from the Lord! He who hath made Heaven and
Earth! (not these idols).”

I have had an admiration for Ginsburg ever since he shut up the two Atheists in the Athenæum Club, Huxley and Herbert Spencer, who were reviling Holy Writ in Ginsburg’s presence and flouting him. So he asked the two of them to produce anything anywhere in literature comparable to the 23rd Psalm as translated by Wyclif, Tyndale, and Coverdale. He gave them a week to examine, and at the end of it they confessed that they could not.

One of them (I could not find out which it was) wrote:

“I won’t argue about nor admit the Inspiration claimed, but I say this--that those saintly men whom Cromwell formed as the company to produce the Great Bible of 1539 _were inspired_, for never has the spirit of the original Hebrew been more beautifully transformed from the original harshness into such spiritual wealth.”

Those are not the exact words, I have not got them by me, but that was the sense.

The English language in A.D. 1539 was at its very maximum. Hence the beauty of the Psalms which come from the Great Bible as produced by that holy company of pious men, who one writer says: “Did not wish their names to be ever known.” I send you the title page.

Yours, etc.,
(Signed) FISHER.
27/3/18.

I enclosed with this letter the front page of the first edition of the Great Bible, A.D. 1539, often known as Cranmer’s Bible, but Archbishop Cranmer had nothing whatever to do with it except writing a preface to it; it was solely due to Cromwell, Secretary of State to Henry VIII., who cut off Cromwell’s head in July, 1540. Cranmer wrote a preface for the edition after April, 1540. Cranmer was burnt at the stake in Mary’s reign. Tyndale was strangled and burnt, Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, died of hunger. Coverdale headed the company that produced the Great Bible, and Tyndale’s translation was taken as the basis. (So those who had to do with the Bible had a rough time of it!)

John Wyclif, in A.D. 1380, began the translation of the Bible into English. This was before the age of printing, so it was in manuscript. Before he died, in A.D. 1384, he had the joy of seeing the Bible in the hands of his countrymen in their own tongue.

Wyclif’s translation was quaint and homely, and so idiomatic as to have become out of date when, more than one hundred years afterwards, John Tyndale, walking over the fields in Wiltshire, determined so to translate the Bible into English “that a boy that driveth the plough should know more of the Scriptures than the Pope,” and Tyndale gloriously succeeded! But for doing so, the Papists, under orders from the Pope of Rome, half strangled him and then burnt him at the stake. Like St. Paul, he was shipwrecked! (Just as he had finished the Book of Jonah, which is curious, but there was no whale handy, and so he was cast ashore in Holland, nearly dead!)

Our present Bible, of A.D. 1611, is almost word for word the Bible of Tyndale, of round A.D. 1530, but in A.D. 1534, Miles Coverdale, Bishop of Exeter, was authorised by Archbishop Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell (who was Secretary of State to Henry VIII.) to publish his fresh translation, and he certainly beautified in many places Tyndale’s original!

In 1539, “Diverse excellent learned men expert in the ‘foresaid tongues’” (Hebrew and Greek), under Cromwell’s orders made a true translation of the whole Bible, which was issued in 1539–40 in four editions, and remained supreme till A.D. 1568, when the Bishops tried to improve it, and made a heavenly mess of it! And then the present Authorised Version, issued in A.D. 1611, became the Bible of the Land, and still holds its own against the recent pedantic Revised Version of A.D. 1884. No one likes it. It is literal, but it is not spiritual!

In the opinion of Great and Holy men, Cranmer’s Bible (as it is called), or “the Great Bible”--the Bible of 1539 to 1568--holds the field for beauty of its English and its emotional rendering of the Holy Spirit!

Alas! we don’t know their names; we only know of them as “Diverse excellent learned men!” It is said they did not wish to go down to Fame!

“It is the greatest achievement in letters! The Beauty of the translation of these unknown men excels (far excels) the real and the so-called originals! All nations and tongues of Christendom have come to admit reluctantly that no other version of the Book in the English or any other tongue offers so noble a setting for the Divine Message. Read the Prayer Book Psalms! They are from this noble Version--English at its zenith! The English of the Great Bible is even more stately, sublime, and pure than the English of Shakespeare and Elizabeth.”

ACTION

“Ye men of Galilee! Why stand ye gazing up into Heaven?” (Acts, Chapter i., verse 11.)

The moral of this one great central episode of the whole Christian faith (which, if a man don’t believe with his utmost heart he is as a beast that perisheth, so Saint Paul teaches in I. Corinthians, Chapter xv.), the moral of it is that however intense at any moment of our lives may be the immediate tension that is straining our mental fibre to the limit, yet we are to “get on!” and not stand stock still “gazing up into Heaven!” Inaction must be no part of our life, and we must “get on” with our journey as the Apostles did--“to our own City of Jerusalem!”

It is curious that Thursday (Ascension Day) was not made the Christian Sabbath. No scientific agnostic could possibly explain the Ascension by any such theories as those that try to get over the fact of the Resurrection by cataleptic happenings or an inconceivable trance! The agnostic can’t explain away that He was seen by the Apostles to be carried up into Heaven when in the act of lifting up His hands upon them to bless them “and a cloud received Him out of their sight!”

_Vide_ the Collect for the Sunday after Ascension Day!

RESENTMENT

The prophet Zechariah says in Chapter xiv., verse 7:

“At evening time
It shall be light!”

And I conclude that in the last stage of life, as pointed out so very decisively by Dr. Weir Mitchell (that great American), “the brain becomes its best,” and so we rearrange our hearts and minds to the great advantage of our own Heaven and the avoidance of Hell to others! “Resentment” I find to fade away, and it merges into the feeling of Commiseration! (“Poor idiots!” one says instead of “D--n ’em!”) But I can’t arrive as yet at St. Paul, who deliberately writes that he’s quite ready to go to Hell so as to let his enemy go to Heaven! You’ve got really to be a real Christian to say that! I’ve not the least doubt, however, that John Wesley, Bishop Jeremy Taylor and Robertson of Brighton felt it surely! Isn’t it odd that those three great saints (fit to be numbered “with these three men, Noah, Daniel and Job,” Ezekiel, Chapter xiv., verse 14) each of them should have a “nagging” wife!

Their Home was Hell!

And I’ve searched in vain for any one of the three saying a word to the detriment of the other sex! They might all have been Suffragettes! (St. Paul does indeed say that he preferred being single! But Peter was married!)

But this “Resentment” section hinges entirely on “Charity” as defined and exemplified by Mr. Robertson, of Brighton, in one of the best of his wonderful Trinity Chapel Sermons.

DEAN INGE

I heard the Dean of St. Paul’s (Dr. Inge) preach in Westminster Abbey on the 17th Chapter of St. Matthew, verse 19: “Then came the disciples to Jesus apart, and said, ‘Why could not we cast him out?’”

The sermon was really splendiferous!

The Saviour had just cast out a devil that had been too much for the disciples, and He told them their inability to do so was due to their want of Faith, and added: “Howbeit this kind goeth not out but by prayer.” The Dean explained to us that some ascetic annotator 400 years afterwards had shoved in at the end of these two additional words--“and fasting.” That, of course, was meant by the Dean as “one in the eye” for those who fast like the Pharisees and for a pretence make long prayers! Then the Dean was just too lovely as to “Prayer!” He said he was so sick of people praying for victory in the great War! And speaking generally he was utterly sick of people praying for what they wanted! (as if _that_ was Prayer!) No! the Dean divinely said, “Prayer was the exaltation of the Spirit of a Man to dwell with God and say in the Saviour’s words, ‘Not my will but Thine be done.’” “Get right thus with God,” said the Dean, “and then go and make Guns and Munitions with the utmost fury. That (said the Dean) was the way to get Victory, and not by silly vain petitions as if you were asking your Mamma for a bit of barley sugar.” (I don’t mean to say the Dean used these exact words!) Then he said an interesting thing that “this event of the disciples ignominiously failing to cast out the devil” happened to these chief of His apostles just after their coming down from the Mount of Transfiguration, where they had been immensely uplifted by the Heavenly Vision of the Saviour talking with Moses and Elijah. The Dean said “that it was really a curious fact of large experience that when you were thus lifted up in a Heavenly Spirit it was a sure precursor of a fierce temptation by the Devil!” These highly-favoured disciples, after such a communion with God, thought that they themselves, by themselves, could do anything! Pride had a fall! They could not cast out that devil! They trusted in themselves and did not give God the praise! And so it was that Moses didn’t go over Jordan, for he struck the rock and said, “How now, ye rebels!” (I’ll show you who I am!)

The Dean also observed that it was the Drains that had to be put right when there was an Epidemic of Typhoid Fever! “Prayer” wasn’t the Antidote!

The holy man Saint Francis summed up all religion and the Christian life in his famous line:

“How we are in the sight of God!--That is the only thing that matters!”

PHOTOGRAPH, TAKEN AND SENT TO SIR JOHN FISHER BY THE EMPRESS MARIE OF RUSSIA, OF A GROUP ON BOARD H.M.S. “STANDARD,” 1909.

1. Lord Hamilton of Dalzell.
2. The Chevalier de Martino.
3. Sir Arthur Nicholson.
4. M. Stolypin, Russian Prime Minister.
5. The Czarina.
6. M. Isvolsky, Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs.
7. Sir John Fisher.
8. Sir Charles Hardinge.
9. Baron Fredericks.
10. The Grand Duchess Olga.
11. The Czar.
12. The Princess Victoria.
13. The Grand Duke Michael.
14. Count Benckendorff, Russian Ambassador.
]

FORGIVENESS

It fortuned this morning that I read Joseph’s interview with his Brethren just after the death of their Father Jacob. They, having done their best to murder Joseph quite naturally thought that he would now be even with them, so they told a lie. They said that Jacob their Father had very kindly left word with them that he hoped Joseph would be very nice with his brethren after he died. Jacob said no such thing. Jacob knew his Joseph. But it gave Joseph a magnificent opportunity for reading one of Mr. Robertson’s, of Brighton, Sermons--he said to them, “Am I in the place of God?” Meaning thereby that no bread and water that he might put them on, and no torturing thumbscrews, would in any way approach the unquenchable fire and the undying worm that the Almighty so righteously reserves for the blackguards of this life. Which reminds me of the best Sermon I ever heard by the present Dean of Salisbury, Dr. Page-Roberts. He said: “There is no Bankruptcy Act in Heaven. No 10s. in the £1 there. Every moral, debt has got to be paid in full,” and consequently Page-Roberts, though an extremely broad-minded man, was the same as the extreme Calvinist of the unspeakable Hell and the Roman Catholic’s Purgatory. How curious it is how extremes do meet!