The supreme book of mankind : the origin and influence of the English Bible

Front matter

eqhETHEL SEMINARY LIBRARY

“TAT eS ee a i

3412 ALDRICH AVE. SO.

Foreword

The aim of these lectures is, through an interesting story told with as few dates and names as possible, to leave a general impression on the popular mind.

Back of each historical statement is an unquoted authority. It is hoped that the very simplicity of the treatment will aid in securing the desired end, so that all hearers and readers will almost unconsciously be led to realize the values which the Bible has brought to the English-speaking world.

The word “English” is used consistently throughout the lectures to indicate the people living in southern Britain in the year 597 A. D. and their successors, and to indicate also the language in its different dialects as then spoken and in its different changes as spoken since.

Vast areas of information essential to the complete telling of this story have necessarily been entirely omitted in order that the story, to the degree to which it is actually told, should attain its end and be easily apprehended.

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TABLE OF CHAPTERS

Tur CoMING OF THE BIBLE TO THE ENGLISH

Tur CONVERSION OF THE ENGLISH THROUGH THE BIBLE

Tue BIBLE IN THE EDUCATION OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD

Tue BIBLE IN THE LITERATURE OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING PEOPLE

Tue BIBLE IN THE MISSIONS OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD

Tuer BIBLE IN THE GENERAL LIFE OF THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD

PNDEX 4 as

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Sree of literature, lovers of chaste English, will enjoy reading Fames G. K. McClure’s “The Supreme Book of Mankind”—but there is a greater value for many in the book. Those who know him realize it is not only the words but the life and the character of the man that give weight and strength to utterances that come from his pen. No apology, therefore, is offered for sending out this book. It will make a place in the heart and in the library of every minister who loves the Supreme Book.

When tired, despondent, weary of head and rebellious of heart, turn to page 109 and read Chapter IV, “‘The Bible in the Literature of the English Speaking People.” The rare simplicity of the language used, the entrancing beauty of thought enunciated, the rich ‘‘deeps” of faith revealed, the scholarly massing of testimony will draw you through page after page as you feel the thrill of your own faith vivified and you realize the strengthening of your own “backbone” of deep and high regard for the Bible as the greatest book in all literature. You cannot willingly lay aside the book until that chapter is fully read. How that chapter prepares you for Chapter VI. Its perusal will add virility to your spoken words to your congregations. Certainly these chapters will revitalize your faith and make you stronger and clearer in your utterances as to the Bible, the foundation of our religion.

I believe the six hundred ministers to whom I now send the book will find it a storehouse from which to draw material for many a sermon and prayer-meeting talk.

GEO. D. DAYTON.

Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Chapter I The Coming Of The Bible To The English

Off the eastern coast of Europe, in the Atlantic Ocean, and quite up to the North, lies a group of islands, five thousand in number. As they appear on a geographical map they have been likened to little pieces of ice, as such pieces are

often scen in the higher latitudes, drifting aimlessly here and there away from some high glacier. Many of them are mere ledges of rock, lift- ‘ing a few acres of grass land beyond reach of the breakers. Some are so bare and jagged that they afford footing only for the sea-birds who make them their haunt. There are, however, among these five thousand islands two that are called the British Isles. England, Wales and Scotland form one of them, while Ireland forms the other. In their own immediate surroundings these isles make quite a showing for their size: but when they are compared with the land surface of the globe they shrink into insignificance, for they together are only a four hundred and twenty-third of it. And when Ireland, Wales and Scotland are eliminated and England is measured by itself alone, its surface becomes less than one-half of that four hundred and twenty-third part. 3

The single State of Texas could find ample accommodation for five Englands within her borders and could provide spacious parkways in addition for them all. .

England thus viewed shrinks into diminutiveness. Besides, little as it is, the ocean waves beating upon it from three sides are always wearing away its soil. Fogs constantly claim it as their own, enshrouding it with dampness and chill. Winter brings cold and storm. The climate, limited to six degrees of latitude of the temperate zone, allows small range for variety of crops. Its rivers are small and sluggish. Many other parts of the earth seem more propitious, more inviting and more promising.

However to-day England controls nearly one-fourth of the earth’s area. The sun never sets upon her dominions, for they belt the entire globe. Nor is her influence confined within her own territories, for she has given her language, not alone to her own populations, but also to millions upon millions of peoples who are entirely independent of her governmental control, peoples markedly forceful and aggressive. The result is that the English-speaking peoples of the earth, taken all together, are far up to the very front rank, if not at the very front, of those commanding recognition and power among the entire human race.

Here then is a very remarkable fact—that a small part of the vast earth exerts so wide-spread and so dominant an influence all over the globe— remarkable especially when we bear in mind the kind of people the original inhabitants were who gave their name to England. Can this fact be explained?

There is an incident which supplies the basis for the explanation. Soon after Easter, the springtime of hope and blessing, in the year 597 -A.D., a scene took place on a little insulated portion of land called Thanet off the coast of Southern England, a scene that was destined to be marvellously determinative and far reaching in the history of the human race. As lovers of mankind make pilgrimages to Plymouth Rock in America, so lovers of mankind may well make pilgrimages to Thanet in England.

This Thanet, at the extreme northeastern corner of Kent, was then separated from the mainland by a sea passage half a mile wide. It had a sea-face of bold slopes or sheer cliffs, and had derived its name, which means beacon, from the number of watchfires or beacons which appeared from time to time on this easily accessible and easily ravished coast. These beacons might be guides to safety or lures to destruction according to the purpose of their builders.

The scene was the approach and landing of a two-sailed vessel coming across the channel from France. This in itself was no unusual scene at this particular point. Vessels, large and small, were always going and coming. But when the passengers of this boat disembarked they presented a most unusual sight. There were about forty of them, all dressed alike, in plain black gowns, fitted somewhat loosely to their bodies and extending from their necks to their feet. They were without hats, their faces shaven, their hair dark, their color swarthy and their features sharply intellectual. All this was different from the people who watched them, for the observers had covered heads, were bearded, had brown hair, were light-colored and round-faced. These new comers had left Rome in the spring of the previous year and it had taken them more than a twelvemonth to make the journey to this land which was spoken of as “the end of the ocean.” They were of the Benedictine order of monks, and they had-come as best they could press their way, on foot and in small boats, from their monastery of St. Andrew on the Coelian Hill at Rome. This monastery was just opposite the Coliseum which they were accustomed to look upon daily, with its memories of the men and women who faced wild boars, ravenous. tigers, and devouring lions in devotion to their Christian belief, and who made the sand of the arena red with their martyrs’ life-blood. It was intended that the spirit of similar unflinching and unquenchable devotion should be instilled into the monks so that when a duty, whatever its nature, had been assigned to them, they would face labors and any dangers it involved unhesitatingly, even if that duty led them to attempt labor in a strange, far-away and perilous land.

A few days passed after their landing. Then they received permission to form a procession and hold an interview with the ruler of the land. This procession is notable in every feature. At its head, the onlookers observed a cross. It was -a plain, bare cross, crucifixes not having as yet been introduced into use. It was of the Latin shape, made of silver. Then the eyes of the onlookers caught sight of a large upright piece of wood, some feet in height, that had the figure of a man upon it in gilt, the use of gilt in religious pictures then being the custom of the age at Rome. The figure was of Christ, not emaciated as later became the fashion of representing him, but full-bodied and virile, a man of strength and command. The cross and the picture were quite in evidence to the eye. But there were some other possessions that these monks were bringing with them that were not in such evidence, possessions absolutely necessary if the onlookers were ever to understand what the silver cross stood for and to understand also who and what the man pictured on the board was. These possessions were nine books.

Books meant little or nothing to the onlookers for they did not know what a book was. All they knew was that they could put shapes of various kinds, called “runes,” on leaves of the beech tree, “boke” tree, and could also cut such runic shapes into stones intended to be memorials. They could even roll together cloth or other articles on which they had made these shapes, and so preserve a record of laws. But here were volumes with pages all in order, bound in parchment (binding having come into use about the year 300 A. D.), and for the first time in the history of the English people they saw a library, a collection of books. Little did they, could they, realize that in that first English library lay the future welfare and even the destiny of their race.

What were these nine books? The traditional order of mentioning them is: The Holy Bible, in two volumes; The Psalter; The Four Gospels; A Second Psalter; A Second Copy of the Four Gospels; The Apocryphal Lives of the Apostles; The Lives of the Martyrs; An Exposition of the Gospels and Epistles.

These nine books may well have our careful study. They are to be the entire dependence of the monks for success in the work they have come to undertake, namely, the conversion of the English people to Christianity. Of all books penned by man and held in man’s hand, these books are destined to play the largest part, the most determining part books have ever played in human life, a part that is so clear that it can be distinctly traced.

It will be noticed that they were all Biblical, either the whole or a part of the Bible itself, or they are based upon or connected with the Bible. The Bible itself in the two volumes, in the two Psalters and in the two Four-Gospels made six volumes of the library. The Lives of the Apostles, The Lives of the Martyrs and the Exposition of the Gospels and Epistles made the remaining three of the books—nine in all.

They were all written in Latin, carefully penned. The Bible, Psalter and Gospels were in Roman “uncials,” that is, large capital letters, written without a break between the words, without a break too between the sentences, and without punctuation of any kind whatsoever. They had been copied from what was called the Old Italian Version of the Scriptures made perhaps three hundred years earlier and not yet supplanted by Jerome’s version that would in after time be known as the Vulgate. Uncials too were employed for the remaining volumes, volumes which would explain, illustrate and enforce the Bible.

All these volumes were in double columns with from twenty-five to thirty lines to a page.

How meagre England’s first library seemed as compared with other libraries! In Nineveh in the days of Assurbanipal, King of Assyria, there was a library consisting of some ten thousand distinct tablets and documents, methodically arranged and catalogued and thrown open for the use of the king’s subjects. Alexandria in Egypt, when the Ptolemies were atthe front, had at least 500,000 rolls or volumes, with a staff of librarians. Rome, at the very hour of the landing of the monks in England, had private and public libraries, and the librarian had grown to be a recognized public official; and in Rome there was even a superintendent of libraries. Jerusalem, Crsarea and Constantinople had valuable collections of books. Near Nimes in France there was a library so large that it was sometimes playfully compared to Alexandria’s 500,000 rolls. All these libraries dealt with a great variety of subjects. But here the total library of England was merely these nine books, every one of them Biblical, and only Biblical. How few, how insignificant, they seemed in comparison with other libraries!

Two ancient manuscripts, claimed to date almost back to the landing at Thanet, are preserved, the one at Cambridge, and the other at

Oxford. They show us how these volumes looked, the ink faded and brown, the parchment leaves being in each case quartos, that at Cambridge nine and one-half inches long by seven and one-half wide, two and one-quarter in thickness, while that at Oxford is ten inches long by seven and one-quarter wide, the sizes being almost identical. The manuscripts differ only in one feature, the Cambridge being ornamented with drawings of the highest interest, which are the most ancient monuments of pictorial art existing in England; and the one at Oxford having no ornamentation of any kind.

But we have not finished with the procession. As the monks moved forward in their dependence upon these books, they sang, from the very books they were bringing, for they sang from the Psalter. This feature of the procession is illuminating. The first voice of the first library of the English-speaking world is in a song, a song from the Bible. The Benedictines were singers and their songs were founded on the Bible, particularly on the Psalms. Songs then entered into every feature of their life, wherever they were, whatever they were doing. This day they sang an expression of their belief in God, of their sorrow for sin, of their dependence on divine mercy, of their desire for God’s blessing on their effort, and of their happy praise for God. The words they used were: “We beseech Thee, O Lord, in all Thy mercy, that Thy anger and wrath may be turned away from this city and from Thy holy name, because we have sinned. Hallelujah.” The first message of the Bible’ever heard by the English-speaking race was this message from the Litany, that is, from the form of public supplication used in processions. This message be it noted —in view of later circumstances of great significance—was borne on the wings of a song, closing with Hallelujah, meaning “praise to Jehovah.”

So much for the procession, the Bible proces-

sion in itself. What was it for? It was because men had come to inculcate in England their religion, their religion of the Bible. Could they do it? Who and what were these English people to whom they had come?

- They were heathen, untaught in and absolutely unacquainted with the Christian religion. They were not natives born to the soil, for they had come across the waters from the northern portions of the Continent, the Germanic portions unreached by any Christian missionary, and they had brought all their heathen beliefs and practices with them.

The very fact that they were then in England indicates their general nature. They have been sea-rovers, pillaging wherever they could beach their boats. They have descended upon any coast where they could effect a landing and secure booty. They have had no hesitation in entering any bay, attacking any community, burning any house, taking any object of value and leaving only flames and desolation behind them. They have been willing to receive pay for driving out the enemies of those who would employ them. So when enemies from Scotland, Ireland and Wales, pressing in from the North and West, threatened to exterminate the original inhabitants of southern England or force them into the sea, the English came over from their native coasts and hired themselves out as mercenaries to the original inhabitants. Later the English decided that they would seize the land of their employers for themselves and possess it as their own. Consequently they surrendered money and rewards, and instead took the land itself for they were no longer mercenaries dependent upon others. They were the independent owners of the land.

Their reputation was bad. A Roman poet of their day sang, “Foes they are, fierce beyond other foes, and cunning as they are fierce. The sea is their school of war, and the storm their friend: they are sea-wolves that live on the pillage of the world.”

Long years afterward Taine* described them. Perhaps his imagination and rhetoric have some-

*History of English Literature.”

thing to do with his delineation, still he claims to be historical in his statement:

Behold them, half naked savages, a kind of wild beast, fishers and hunters, even hunters of men, huge white bodies, cool blooded, with fierce blue eyes, reddish flaxen hair, ravenous stomachs filled with meat and cheese, of a cold temperament toward strangers, prone to drunkenness. Pirates at first; of all kinds of hunting the man hunt is the most profitable and most noble. They dashed to sea in their two-sailed barks, they landed anywhere, killed everything and having sacrificed in honor of their gods, the tithe of their captives as well as of their goods, and leaving behind them the red light of their burnings went further to begin again. Of all barbarians these are the strongest of body and heart, the most formidable, the most cruelly ferocious. When murder becomes a trade, it becomes a pleasure.

So writes Taine. But he is only one witness and we wish to know all that we possibly can know about these originators of the English-speaking race.

The historian Procopius, a few years before the first library entered England, wrote a description of the land which indicates the judgment men in France had of its nature. The description is somewhat weird. He says:*

The Island of England is the Island of Silence and the Dead. Opposite the Island the coast of France has fish-

*De Bello Gothico,” IV : 20.

ermen and husbandmen who hold the land free, excepting for one service that they are bound to render, namely, the transfer of the souls of those who die in France to the shores of the island. At midnight an unseen hand knocks at their doors and the voice of an unseen being summons them to their special labors. How or why they are constrained to obey, they know not: they only know that they cannot resist the constraint. They rise from their beds, they hurry to the . shore and there they find boats, not their own, strange boats, loaded to a finger’s breadth between the gunwale and the water. Yet no forms are seen, no freight is visible. They put off; they bend to their oars; and, marvellous to say, in one short hour they have traversed the channel of many miles and they have driven the strange boats upon the shore of the island, a distance which in their own boats, with oars and sails, they can scarcely reach in a whole night and in a whole day also. Not a single form is seen to rise up in the boats and step upon the shore. And still there is a voice that calls each shadow-ghost by name, telling who he was, what he did, who his parents were. As, in obedience to this voice, its cargo goes ashore, the boat lightens, rises in the water, only the keel being covered. Then the rowers having done their task leave the Island of Silence and of the Dead, and return to their own land, the land of gladness and of life.

It was such stories as these that got into the air and were believed in France and wherever they were told, even as far as Constantinople. England was cut off from civilization. Her people were objects of a mysterious terror. The land was declared to be covered with serpents and the air to be such that no man could inhale it and live. The monks with the books had heard, as they made their way from forest to forest from Rome, such grim tales, and it was not to be marvelled at that when they heard them, their hearts blanched and they hesitated to go forward; indeed these selected men of courage actually wanted to give up their project, and not take another step in their journey to the island. And to this end they sent their leader, the tallest and largest of them all, and supposedly the bravest, back to Rome to ask that they might give up their undertaking and return. He went and presented their request. But their request was denied and they were told that they must proceed. They had put their hand to the plough; they must not look back.

Exaggerated and fanciful as such stories were, nevertheless these English people, these fierce, overpowering intruders, might well be held in fear. For this is what they had actually done; they had laid hands upon this land of Britain, where Christianity generations before had been planted and had even attained vigor, and they had so effectively and with such thoroughness conquered the land that Christianity was absolutely destroyed there, or lingered only in far-away and sequestered nooks. Heathen teachings and heathen rites were established by them with undisputed sway. A land once Christianized thus actually fell back into paganism. This is one of the marvels of history, almost incredible, that the English could supplant Christianity with their heathenism and could drive back those Christians who were allowed to live into Wales or into the north of the island. They burned the churches of Christ. They cut down the priests at the altars. They forced the peasants who held the Christian faith to throw themselves on a ring of pitiless steel that sundered body and soul. Freeman says, “They wiped out everything Keltic,” that is, everything that was originally there, “as everything Roman was wiped out of Africa by the Saracen conquerors of Carthage.”

What were these heathen teachings and rites which they held so tenaciously and which they substituted for Christianity? We need to be very careful and exact as we describe these people for it would be a mistake if we either exaggerated their beliefs and customs, or if we minimized in any way their manner of life. Whatever is unfavorable should be stated as it actually was. Whatever too is favorable should also be stated exactly as it was.

It may be that once they believed in One all wise and powerful Spirit, but not now. For now they believed in many gods and in a great multitude of spirits, witches, ghosts, endowed with every kind of enchantment, for good or evil. Their highest God was Woden. He was omniscient, having great skill in magic and possessed of many wives and favorites. He was the dispenser of victory. Then there was Thor, son of Woden, a wrathful deity, god of thunder who received to his palace the warrior who had fallen in battle. The thunder was caused by the rolling of his chariot, which was drawn by he-goats. He wielded a hammer with which he struck down his foes. He was in the vigor of youth, had a red beard and was the strongest of the gods. He revealed himself when the dark clouds gathered and the fire bolt dashed through the skies, uncontrollable and terrific. Loki was a third god, the calumniator and backbiter of the other gods, the grand contriver of deceit and fraud. Once he had been the friend and associate of the gods, united with them by the most sacred bonds of brotherhood. But he fell like Lucifer, and though fairer than any of human mould, his mind was evil, he cheated in all things and in the arts of perfidy and craft he had no equal. Freya may be mentioned fourth in the catalogue who was the goddess of fertility, of seed time and harvest, of marriage and fruitfulness. Saeter was a water deity who is represented as standing upon a fish with a basket in his hand. Tyr was distinctively the god of battles whose grandmother was an ugly giantess with nine hundred heads. Hel was the goddess of the lower world who received the souls of cowards, the souls of the weaklings and unworthy who had not dared to face peril and endure pain.

Like gods like people is an old truism. People never rise higher than their gods. Like produces like. The English gods were malicious, cruel, given to the fight. So the English people hated their foes, tormented them when they could, revelled in the fight. They sacrificed, as propitiatory of these gods, sheep, oxen and swine, and especially horses. They slew the victims before the images of the gods and the blood was sprinkled on the altar, on the images and on themselves. But the victims were not confined to the brute creation. Human lives were likewise sacrificed; usually they were the lives of slaves, criminals or prisoners; sometimes they were the lives of their own people. The victims were crushed on a great stone, and then their blood was poured out, that the gods might turn aside an impending evil or might deal graciously with the souls of friends already passed into the abode of death.

For they believed in life after death. There was a Valhalla, the blissful home of those who fell gloriously in battle. The supreme reward that the gods could give was a place in Valhalla.

Thus to die was sure proof of reaching it. Within Valhalla there is an eternal fight and an eternal feast. The heroic spirit never dies. Every day Valhalla’s heroes joy in giving blows and rejoice too in receiving them, clashing armor upon armor in the wild onset of battle. Every evening wounds are perfectly healed, all hearts thrill with strength, all voices are merry. The victors and the vanquished in the day’s strife alike surround the banqueting tables, while fair female attendants bring abundant food and still more abundant beer and mead. Tomorrow-day and tomorrow-evening will be the same.

As entrance to Valhalla was the supreme reward of life, so entrance to the realm of the goddess Hel was the supreme penalty. Her palace was the very opposite of Valhalla—the bright and the hopeful, a veritable scene of action and feasting—for Hel’s palace bore the name Anguish, her table was called Famine, the waiters were Slowness and Delay, the threshold of the palace was Precipice and the bed where her captives lay was Care. Well might the heart of any man shrink from ever experiencing the disgrace and the woe of Hel!

But far beyond the mere worship of a few designated gods and goddesses was the hold their religion had on the thoughts and on the doings of the English, because they peopled the woods, the rivers, the mountains with spirits. These spirits were not friendly, but threatening. They were devils and many a place was named after them. It was this people who started the custom of associating any spot that was at all unusual or irregular in its conformation with the Devil, as in England the “Devil’s Punch Bowl” and the “Devil’s Dyke.” All over the earth they have left the impress of this custom. Travel where we will, we come upon objects bearing the Devil’s name. In the Yellowstone Park where boiling springs and spouting geysers suggest evil forces beneath the surface there will be the “Devil’s Kitchen” and the “Devil’s Paint Box.” If we keep our attention acute to such association of the Devil with the freaks of nature we shall note that wherever English-speaking people have gone, the world over, they have found the “Devil’s foot,” or the “Devil’s hand,” or the “Devil’s Nose,” or some other feature of the Devil.

Our special devil was named Nicor. He survives in our “Old Nick,” and in our “nixies,” the hobgoblins of mischief and harm. Old Nick or Nicor was a dangerous water demon, a dreaded monster who demanded a human victim every year and carried off children, who strayed too near to his abode, beneath the waters. Deuce, as in the phrase which has come down to this day, “Deuce take it,” was Twi, a demon who seized and destroyed. Then there was Mara, a savage devil who tortured men with terrible visions and later crushed them even to death under a horrible weight. It is from this Mara that we have our word “night-mare.” And in this connection there are authorities who claim that our present-day mince pie was really Woden pie, a great pie originally made up of many different ingredients held sacred to this god, sometimes so large as to cover a table and so deep that when the crust was broken gifts could be taken from it and perhaps birds would come forth from it and sing. Mara, the god of nightmare, and a Woden pie of mixed ingredients, a mince pie, are thus to us ludicrously associated. But to these people, back of every merriment we may make of their beliefs, lay the tremendous fact that every waterfall, ravine, crag, shrieking of the wind, had a fearsome devil in it. Nature was to them preternatural with evil.