Thus, when Tindale and Coverdale came to make their translations of the Bible in the sixteenth century, they found ready to their hand a vocabulary of feeling which had indeed been drawn in the first place from the austerities of the religious life, but which had in many cases acquired warmer and more human echoes by having been applied to secular uses. And just as lyrical devotion to the Virgin Mary and to the infant Jesus had evolved a vocabulary which could express, and thus partly create, a sentiment of tenderness towards all women and young children, so we seem to feel the warmth of human affection, as it were, reflected back into religious emotion in such creations as Coverdale’s _lovingkindness_ and _tender mercy_, Tindale’s _long-suffering_, _mercifulness_, _peacemaker_, and _beautiful_ (for it was he who brought this word into general use), and in many of the majestically simple phrases of the Authorised Version. In tracing the elements of modern consciousness through the history of words in this way, there is one mistake which it is especially important to avoid, and that is the mistake of over-simplification. For instance, just as it is true that the shade of feeling which we call ‘tenderness’ can be traced back to the literature of the Middle Ages, and that from there we can trace it farther back still, through the Mariolatry of the Roman Church to the opening chapters of the Luke Gospel, and so to the old Egyptian Isis-worship and the philosophy of Plato, so it is also true that it can be understood more perfectly and felt more fully when we have thus unravelled it. But not to realize that with the appearance of a poetic tradition which can give rise to such a poem as “I sing of a maiden” something quite new, something with no perceptible historical origin, enters into humanity, is to cultivate a deaf ear to literature, and to mistake quite as grievously both the method and the object of understanding history. If medieval Europe is cut off from Greece and Rome by her imaginative conception of women, she is cut off even more completely by her abstention from slavery. Of this development, thus negatively stated, there are few, if any, signs in our language; but traces are by no means wanting of a certain deeper and more interior change which must have underlain the other two. Perhaps it can best be expressed as a new consciousness of the individual human soul. On the one hand the sense of its independent _being_ and activity, of bottomless depths and soaring heights within it, to be explored in fear and trembling or with hope and joy—with _delight_ and _mirth_, or with _agony_, _anguish_, _despair_, _repentance_—and on the other hand that feeling of its being an _inner_ world, which has since developed so fully that this book, for example, has fallen naturally into two halves.