The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and LiteratureMcAfee, Cleland Boyd
History
The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and Literature
McAfee, Cleland Boyd
Bible -- History; Bible -- Influence; Bible and literature; Bible. English -- Versions -- Authorized
The influence of the Bible comes also from
the fact that it makes its chief appeal to the
deeper elements in life. "Human history in its
real character is not an account of kings and of
wars; it is the unfolding of the moral, the political,
the artistic, the social, and the spiritual
progress of the human family. The time will
yet come when the names of dynasties and of
battles shall not form the titles of its chapters.
The truths revealed in the Bible have been the
touchstone which has tried men's spirits."[1]
[1] H. B. Smith, Faith and Philosophy, p. 54.
Those words go to the heart of the fact. The
influence of the English Bible on English-
speaking history for the last three hundred
years is only the influence of its fundamental
truths. It has moved with tremendous impact
on the wills of men. It has made the great
human ideals clear and definite; it has made
them beautiful and attractive; but that has not
been enough. It has reached also the springs of
action. It has given men a sense of need and
also a sense of strength, a sense of outrage and a
sense of power to correct the wrong. There it
has differed from most books. Frederick Robertson
said that he read only books with iron in
them, and, as he read, their atoms of iron entered
the blood, and it ran more red for them.
There is iron in this Book, and it has entered
the blood of the human race. Where it has
entered most freely, the red has deepened; and
nowhere has it deepened more than in our
English-speaking races. The iron of our blood
is from this King James version.
Bismarck explained the victories of the Germans
over the French by the fact that from
childhood the Germans had been trained in the
sense of duty, as the French had not been trained,
and as soldiers had learned to feel that nothing
could escape the Eye which ever watched their
course. They learned that, Bismarck said, from
the religion which they had been taught. There
is no mistaking the power of religion in rousing
and sharpening the sense of duty. Webster
spoke for the English-speaking races, and found
his phrases in the Bible, when he said that this
sense "pursues us ever. It is omnipresent like
the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings
of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts
of the sea, duty performed or duty violated is
still with us for our happiness or our misery.
If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the
darkness as in the light our obligations are yet
with us. We cannot escape from their power or
fly from their presence." It is religion which
makes that sense of duty keen; and, whatever
religion has done among English-speaking races,
the English Bible has done, for it has been the
text-book and the final authority of those races
in the moving things of their faith.
It would be easiest in making the argument
to single out here and there the striking events
in which the Bible has figured and let them stand
for the whole. There are many such events,
and they are attractive.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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