The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and LiteratureMcAfee, Cleland Boyd
Religion
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."[43]
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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