Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
General
Harvard Classics Volume 28: Essays English and American
American essays; English essays
17. And in languages so mongrel in breed as the English, there is a
fatal power of equivocation put into men's hands, almost whether they
will or no, in being able to use Greek or Latin words for an idea when
they want it to be awful; and Saxon or otherwise common words when they
want it to be vulgar. What a singular and salutary effect, for
instance, would be produced on the minds of people who are in the habit
of taking the Form of the "Word" they live by, for the Power of which
that Word tells them, if we always either retained, or refused, the
Greek form "biblos," or "biblion," as the right expression for
"book"--instead of employing it only in the one instance in which we
wish to give dignity to the idea, and translating it into English
everywhere else. How wholesome it would be for many simple persons,
if, in such places (for instance) as Acts xix. 19, we retained the
Greek expression, instead of translating it, and they had to
read--"Many of them also which used curious arts, brought their bibles
together, and burnt them before all men; and they counted the price of
them, and found it fifty thousand pieces of silver!" Or, if, on the
other hand, we translated where we retain it, and always spoke of "The
Holy Book," instead of "Holy Bible," it might come into more heads than
it does at present, that the Word of God, by which the heavens were, of
old, and by which they are now kept in store,[3] cannot be made a
present of to anybody in morocco binding; nor sown on any wayside by
help either of steam plough or steam press; but is nevertheless being
offered to us daily, and by us with contumely refused; and sown in us
daily, and by us, as instantly as may be, choked.
18. So, again, consider what effect has been produced on the English
vulgar mind by the use of the sonorous Latin form "damno," in
translating the Greek _chatachrino_, when people charitably wish to
make it forcible; and the substitution of the temperate "condemn" for
it, when they choose to keep it gentle; and what notable sermons have
been preached by illiterate clergymen on--"He that believeth not shall
be damned"; though they would shrink with horror from translating Heb.
xi. 7, "The saving of his house, by which he damned the world"; or John
viii. 10, 11, "Woman, hath no man damned thee? She saith, No man,
Lord. Jesus answered her, Neither do I damn thee; go and sin no more."
And divisions in the mind of Europe, which have cost seas of blood and
in the defense of which the noblest souls of men have been cast away in
frantic desolation, countless as forest leaves--though, in the heart of
them, founded on deeper causes--have nevertheless been rendered
practicably possible, namely, by the European adoption of the Greek
word for a public meeting, "ecclesia," to give peculiar respectability
to such meetings, when held for religious purposes; and other
collateral equivocations, such as the vulgar English one of using the
word "priest" as a contraction for "presbyter."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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