in life. But translation has an important advantage over mere vernacular practice. Men who speak much, having only their own thoughts to express, frame for themselves a comparatively narrow vocabulary and syntax, and acquire a wearisome mannerism of style, from which they seldom succeed in emancipating themselves. If we listen often to a particular speaker, we rarely fail to notice that he has not only his pet words, but a set of expletives, stereotyped phrases, and favorite maxims, which he mechanically throws in, in the same way, and much for the same purpose, as the popular bards hummed a burden at the end of every stanza, while summoning their memory or their invention to help them out with the next verse. The practice of extemporaneous translation forces us into new trains of thought, demanding new forms of phrase; lifts us out of the rut, (to use an expressive colloquialism,) and confers the power of readily calling up familiar or less habitual words and combinations; thus both enlarging our effective vocabulary, and securing us against contracting a restricted personal dialect which is not only repulsive to our hearers, but which reacts injuriously on our own originality and variety of thought.*

* Dr. Johnson complains of translations from foreign literatures, as one of the most fertile sources of corruption in language. I doubt whether English has suffered much from this cause; and, on the other hand, the attempts at a strict literal rendering of the original text in English, from the time of Hereford to the present day, have enriched both our vocabulary and our syntax with many words and combinations which we could ill afford to dispense with. Indeed, so far from introducing an extravagant number of foreign words and phrases, translation has led to the formation of many happy native compounds and derivatives, which would hardly have been struck out except in the search for vernacular equivalents of foreign expressions.

THE revised version of the Bible, now in general use wherever the English tongue is spoken, was executed by order of King James I., and was completed and published in the year 1611. A comparison of the styles of the Preface and the text with contemporaneous and earlier English literature, shows that the translation was taken chiefly from older versions, and that its dialect was not that of the current English of its time.

Its relations to the English language are, for a variety of reasons, more important than those of any other volume; and it may be said, with no less truth, that no Continental translation has occupied an equally influential position in the philology and the literature of the language to which it belongs. The English Bible has been more universally read, more familiarly known and understood, by those who use its speech, than any other version, old or new. In the sixteenth century, the English people were more generally and more thoroughly protestantized than any other nation, and, of course, among them the Bible had a freer and more diffused circulation than it had ever attained elsewhere; for though, in individual German States, the reformed religion soon became the exclusive faith of the people, yet those States formed but a portion of the Germanic nation. Although, therefore, the philological as well as the religious influence of Luther's translation was very great, yet it only indirectly and incidentally affected the speech of that great multitude of Teutons who neither accepted the creed of Luther, nor made use of his

version.

* According to Wattenbach, p. 101 et seq., the word Bible is not derived from the Greek Bißhov, but from Bißhorexa, a common designation, in the Middle Ages, for collections of different works or treatises bound together in one or more volumes. 23

(529),

Again the discussion of the principles of the Reformation and of their collateral results, as a living practical question, connected not only with men's hopes of a future life, but, through civil government, with their dearest interests in this, was longer continued in England than in any other European State. The Puritan movement kept the debate alive in Great Britain long after the wordy war was ended, and men had resorted to the last argument of Kings, in the Continental nations. From the year 1611, the Bible in King James's version was generally ap pealed to as the last resort in all fundamental questions both of church and state; for even those Protestant denominations which gave the greatest weight to tradition, allowed the paramount authority of Scripture, and admitted that traditions irreconcilable with the words of that volume were not of binding force. From the accession of Elizabeth, therefore, and more especially from that of James, until the Acts of Uniformity early in the reign of Charles II. for a time extinguished the religious liberties of England, the theological and political questions, which most concern man's interests in this world and his happiness in that which is to come, were perpetually presented to every thinking Englishman, as points which he not only might, but must, decide for himself at his peril and by lights drawn, directly or indirectly, from the one source of instruction to which all appealed as the final arbiter. For these reasons, the Bible became known to the mind, and incorporated into the heart and the speech, of the Anglican people to a greater extent than any other book ever entered into the life of man, with the possible exceptions of the Hebrew Scriptures, the Homeric poems, and the Arabic Koran.

Although particular points in the authorized version were objected to by the more zealous partisans on both sides of the controversy respectively, and though the English Prayer-Book continued to employ an older translation in the passages of scripture introduced into that ritual, yet the new revision commended itself so generally to the sound judgment of all parties, that in a generation or two it superseded all others, and has now, for more than two centuries, maintained its position as an oracular expression of religious truth, and at the same time as the first classic of our literature-the highest exemplar of purity and beauty of language existing in our speech.

Those who assent to the views which have been so often expressed in these lectures, respecting the reciprocal relations between words, individual or combined, and mental action, will admit that the influence upon the intellectual character of the Anglican people, not of Christian doctrine alone, but of the verbal form in which that doctrine has been embodied, can hardly be over-estimated. Modern philologists, Europeans even, have not been the first to discover the close relation which subsists between formulas, the ipsissima verba of the apostle, and the faith he proclaims. The believing Jew reads the Pentateuch not only in its original tongue, but, as he supposes, in a form approximating to the very inflectional and accentual utterance with which its revelations fell from the lips of Moses; and the pious Moslem allows no translation, no modernization, of the precepts of the Prophet, but contends that the inspired words of the Koran have survived, unchanged, the lapse of twelve centuries. There is little doubt that the immutability of form in the sacred codes of these nations is one of the most important among the causes which have given their religions such a rooted, tenacious hold upon the minds and hearts of those who profess them; and the same remark applies with almost equal force to the modern. Greeks, who, in their religious services, employ the original text, and to the Armenians, who use a very ancient translation of the New Testament. In like manner, the strict adherence of the Romish church to the Vulgate, and to ancient forms of speech, in all the religious uses of language, is one of the great elements of strength on which the Papacy relies.

The Hebrew and the Arab, the Brahmin and the Buddhist, the Oriental and the Latin Christian, inherit, with the blood of their ancestors, if not precisely the popular speech, at least the sacred dialect of their legislators and their prophets; but the Greek and Latin languages were too remote from the speech of the Gothic nations, to have ever served as a vehicle for imparting popular instruction of any sort among those tribes. Hence, the earliest missionaries to the Germanic and Scandinavian nations. learned to address them in the vernacular tongue: portions, more or less complete, of the Scriptures and of other religious books, were very early translated into the Northern dialects; and every man who adopted Christianity, and the culture which everywhere

accompanied it, imbibed its precepts through the accents of his own particular maternal speech. Accordingly, though ENGLISH Protestantism has long had its one unchanged standard of faith, common to all who use the English speech, yet PROTESTANT Christianity, from the number and diversity of the languages it embraces, has no such point of union, no common formulas; and this is one of the reasons why the English people, with all their nominal divisions and multitudinous visible organizations, have not split up into such a wide variety and so extreme a range of actual opinion, as have the Protestants of the Continent. Whatever theories, therefore, may be entertained respecting the evils of a rigorous national conformity to particular symbols-whatever views may be held with regard to the growth, progress, and fluctuations of language--both the theologian and the philologist will admit, that a certain degree of permanence in the standards of religious faith and of grammatical propriety is desirable. The authorized version of the Bible satisfies this reasonable conservatism on both points; and it is, therefore, a matter of much literary as well as religious interest, that it should remain intact, so long as it continues able to discharge the functions which have been appointed to it as a spiritual and a philological instructor.

I do not propose any inquiry into its fidelity simply as a presentation of the doctrinal precepts of Christianity, both because such a discussion would here be inappropriate, and because the general accuracy of the version is so well established, that it is hardly questioned by those who are most zealous for a revision of its dialect. Considered simply as a composition, however, its relations to our literature, and to the social and moral interests of the Anglican family, are well worthy of examination. In the first place, then, the dialect of this translation was not, at the time of the revision, or indeed at any other period, the actual current book-language, nor was it the colloquial speech of the English people. This is a point of much importance, because the contrary opinion has been almost universally taken for granted; and hence very mistaken views have been, and still are, entertained respecting the true relations of the diction of that version to the national tongue. It was an assemblage of the best forms of expression applicable to the communication of religious truth that then existed, or had existed in any and all the succes