Evening Republican, Volume 17, Number 259, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 October 1913 — BIBLE IS GREATEST BOOK [ARTICLE]

BIBLE IS GREATEST BOOK

Sir Arthur Q. Couch in Address at Cambridge, England, Tells of its Priceless Literary Value. Sir Arthur Qulller Couch, in his address on the English Bible at Cambridge, rightly laid stress on the priceless value of the authorized version as the greatest book of English prose. No one will dispute its title to that pre-eminence. What a marvel it Is that this matchless translation, with its noble majesty, its glorious poetry, its divine simplicity, its ecstacy, its pathos, its tenderness, every chapter Instinct with beauty, every verse ringing like a sweet-toned bell, should have been produced by fortyseven men, none of them as, “Q” reminds us, celebrated, outside their share in the translation, for any superlative achievement.

Some persons who set courses of study in English literature omit to take account of the Bible. It.is an amazing omission, for the authorized version has had incomparably more Influence on English literary style and on our English speech than any other book, or than all other books put together. Taine, that discriminating and sympathetic critic, realized how the style of the Bible had, so to say, inwrought itself into the life of England, and interwoven itself into the very texture of English literature. “Q" detects the Influence of the Bible in Izaak Walton and Bunyan, in Milton and Sir Thomas Browne, in Addison and in Gibbon. Taine writes admiringly of Macaulay’s Biblical metaphors; Ruskin, we know, from his own words, found in the Bible, the basis of his entrancing style;* the secret of John Bright’s noble oratory is to be found in his habitual study of the one book. Well may Sir Arthur Quiller Couch say “It is In everything we see, hear, feel; it is in our blood."