There was once an Eastern prince who was much enamoured of the art of gardening. He wished that all flowers delightful to the eye, and all fruits pleasant to the taste and good for food, should grow in his dominion, and that in growing the flowers should become more fair, the fruits more savoury and nourishing. With this thought in his mind and this desire in his heart, he found his way to the Ancient One, the Worker of Wonders who dwells in a secret place, and made known his request.

“For the care of your gardens and your orchards,” said the Ancient One, “I can do nothing, since that charge has been given to you and to your people. Nor will I send blossoming plants and fruiting trees of every kind to make your kingdom rich and beautiful as by magic, lest the honour of labour should be diminished, and the slow reward of patience despised, and even the living gifts bestowed upon you without toil should wither and die away. But this will I do: a single tree shall be brought to you from a far country by the hands of my servants, and you shall plant it in the midst of your land. In the body of that tree is the sap of life that was from the beginning; the leaves of it are full of healing; its flowers never fail, and its fruitage is the joy of every season. The roots of the tree shall go down to the springs of deep waters; and wherever its pollen is drifted by the wind or borne by the bees, the gardens shall put on new beauty; and wherever its seed is carried by the fowls of the air, the orchards shall yield a richer harvest. But the tree itself you shall guard and cherish and keep as I give it you, neither cutting anything away from it, nor grafting anything upon it; for the life of the tree is in all the branches, and the other trees shall be glad because of it.”

As the Ancient One had spoken, so it came to pass. The land of that prince had great renown of fine flowers and delicious fruits, ever unfolding in new colours and sweeter flavours the life that was shed among them by the tree of trees.

I

Something like the marvel of this tale may be read in the history of the Bible. No other book in the world has had such a strange vitality, such an outgoing power of influence and inspiration. Not only has it brought to the countries in whose heart it has been set new ideals of civilization, new models of character, new conceptions of virtue and hopes of happiness; but it has also given new impulse and form to the shaping imagination of man, and begotten beauty in literature and the other arts.

Suppose, for example, that it were possible to dissolve away all the works of art which clearly owe their being to thoughts, emotions, or visions derived from the Bible,—all sculpture like Donatello’s “David” and Michelangelo’s “Moses”; all painting like Raphael’s “Sistine Madonna” and Murillo’s “Holy Family”; all music like Bach’s “Passion” and Handel’s “Messiah”; all poetry like Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and Milton’s “Paradise Lost,”—how it would impoverish the world!

The literary influence of the Bible appears the more wonderful when we consider that it is the work of a race not otherwise potent or famous in literature. We do not know, of course, what other books may have come from the Jewish nation and vanished with whatever of power or beauty they possessed; but in those that remain there is little of exceptional force or charm for readers outside of the Hebrew race. They have no broad human appeal, no universal significance, not even any signal excellence of form and imagery. Josephus is a fairly good historian, sometimes entertaining, but not comparable to Herodotus or Thucydides or Tacitus or Gibbon. The Talmuds are vast storehouses of things new and old, where a careful searcher may now and then find a legendary gem or a quaint fragment of moral tapestry. In histories of mediÆval literature, Ibn Ezra of Toledo and Rashi of Lunel are spoken of with respect. In modern letters, works as far apart as the philosophical treatises of Spinoza and the lyrics of Heinrich Heine have distinction in their kind. No one thinks that the Hebrews are lacking in great and varied talents; but how is it that in world-literature their only contribution that counts is the Bible? And how is it that it counts so immensely?

It is possible to answer by saying that in the Old Testament we have a happily made collection of the best things in the ancient literature of the Jews, and in the New Testament we have another anthology of the finest of the narratives and letters which were produced by certain writers of the same race under a new and exceedingly powerful spiritual impulse. The Bible is excellent because it contains the cream of Hebrew thought. But this answer explains nothing. It only restates the facts in another form. How did the cream rise? How did such a collection come to be made? What gives it unity and coherence underneath all its diversity? How is it that, as a clear critic has well said, “These sixty books, with all their varieties of age, authorship, literary form, are, when properly arranged, felt to draw together with a unity like the connectedness of a dramatic plot?”

There is an answer, which if it be accepted, carries with it a solution of the problem.

Suppose a race chosen by some process of selection (which need not now be discussed or defined) to develop in its strongest and most absolute form that one of man’s faculties which is called the religious sense, to receive most clearly and deeply the impression of the unity, spirituality, and righteousness of a Supreme Being present in the world. Imagine that race moving through a long and varied experience under this powerful impression, now loyal to it, now rebelling against it, now misinterpreting it, now led by the voice of some prophet to understand it more fully and feel it more profoundly, but never wholly losing it for a single generation. Imagine the history of that race, its poetry, the biography of its famous men and women, the messages of its moral reformers, conceived and written in constant relation to that strongest factor of conscious life, the sense of the presence and power of the Eternal.

Suppose, now, in a time of darkness and humiliation, that there rises within that race a prophet who declares that a new era of spiritual light has come, preaches a new revelation of the Eternal, and claims in his own person to fulfil the ancient hopes and promises of a divine deliverer and redeemer. Imagine his followers, few in number, accepting his message slowly and dimly at first, guided by companionship with him into a clearer understanding and a stronger belief, until at last they are convinced that his claims are true, and that he is the saviour not only of the chosen people, but also of the whole world, the revealer of the Eternal to mankind. Imagine these disciples setting out with incredible courage to carry this message to all nations, so deeply impressed with its truth that they are supremely happy to suffer and die for it, so filled with the passion of its meaning that they dare attempt to remodel the life of the world with it. Suppose a human story like this underneath the writing of the books which are gathered in the Bible, and you have an explanation—it seems to me the only reasonable explanation—of their surpassing quality and their strange unity.

This story is not a mere supposition: its general outline, stated in these terms, belongs to the realm of facts which cannot reasonably be questioned. What more is needed to account for the story itself, what potent and irresistible reality is involved in this record of experience, I do not now ask. This is not an estimate of the religious authority of the Bible, nor of its inspiration in the theological sense of that word, but only of something less important, though no less real—its literary influence.

II

The fountain-head of the power of the Bible in literature lies in its nearness to the very springs and sources of human life—life taken seriously, earnestly, intensely; life in its broadest meaning, including the inward as well as the outward; life interpreted in its relation to universal laws and eternal values. It is this vital quality in the narratives, the poems, the allegories, the meditations, the discourses, the letters, gathered in this book, that gives it first place among the books of the world not only for currency, but also for greatness.

For the currency of literature depends in the long run upon the breadth and vividness of its human appeal. And the greatness of literature depends upon the intensive significance of those portions of life which it depicts and interprets. Now, there is no other book which reflects so many sides and aspects of human experience as the Bible, and this fact alone would suffice to give it a world-wide interest and make it popular. But it mirrors them all, whether they belong to the chronicles of kings and conquerors, or to the obscure records of the lowliest of labourers and sufferers, in the light of a conviction that they are all related to the will and purpose of the Eternal. This illuminates every figure with a divine distinction, and raises every event to the nth power of meaning. It is this fact that gives the Bible its extraordinary force as literature and makes it great.

Born in the East and clothed in Oriental form and imagery, the Bible walks the ways of all the world with familiar feet and enters land after land to find its own everywhere. It has learned to speak in hundreds of languages to the heart of man. It comes into the palace to tell the monarch that he is a servant of the Most High, and into the cottage to assure the peasant that he is a son of God. Children listen to its stories with wonder and delight, and wise men ponder them as parables of life. It has a word of peace for the time of peril, a word of comfort for the day of calamity, a word of light for the hour of darkness. Its oracles are repeated in the assembly of the people, and its counsels whispered in the ear of the lonely. The wicked and the proud tremble at its warning, but to the wounded and the penitent it has a mother’s voice. The wilderness and the solitary place have been made glad by it, and the fire on the hearth has lit the reading of its well-worn page. It has woven itself into our deepest affections and coloured our dearest dreams; so that love and friendship, sympathy and devotion, memory and hope, put on the beautiful garments of its treasured speech, breathing of frankincense and myrrh.

Above the cradle and beside the grave its great words come to us uncalled. They fill our prayers with power larger than we know, and the beauty of them lingers on our ear long after the sermons which they adorned have been forgotten. They return to us swiftly and quietly, like doves flying from far away. They surprise us with new meanings, like springs of water breaking forth from the mountain beside a long-trodden path. They grow richer, as pearls do when they are worn near the heart.

No man is poor or desolate who has this treasure for his own. When the landscape darkens and the trembling pilgrim comes to the Valley named of the Shadow, he is not afraid to enter: he takes the rod and staff of Scripture in his hand; he says to friend and comrade, “Good-by; we shall meet again”; and comforted by that support, he goes toward the lonely pass as one who walks through darkness into light.

It would be strange indeed if a book which has played such a part in human life had not exercised an extraordinary influence upon literature. As a matter of fact, the Bible has called into existence tens of thousands of other books devoted to the exposition of its meaning, the defense and illustration of its doctrine, the application of its teaching, or the record of its history. The learned Fabricius, in the early part of the eighteenth century, published a catalogue raisonnÉ of such books, filling seven hundred quarto pages.[1] Since that time the length of the list has probably more than trebled. In addition, we must reckon the many books of hostile criticism and contrary argument which the Bible has evoked, and which are an evidence of revolt against the might of its influence. All this tangle of Biblical literature has grown up around it like a vast wood full of all manner of trees, great and small, useful and worthless, fruit-trees, timber-trees, berry-bushes, briers, and poison-vines. But all of them, even the most beautiful and tall, look like undergrowth, when we compare them with the mighty oak of Scripture, towering in perennial grandeur, the father of the forest.

Among the patristic writers there were some of great genius like Origen and Chrysostom and Augustine. The mediÆval schools of theology produced men of philosophic power, like Anselm and Thomas Aquinas; of spiritual insight, like the author of the Imitatio Christi. The eloquence of France reached its height in the discourses of Bossuet, Bourdaloue, and Massillon. German became one of the potent tongues of literature when Martin Luther used it in his tracts and sermons, and Herder’s Geist der hebrÄischen Poesie is one of the great books in criticism. In English, to mention such names as Hooker and Fuller and Jeremy Taylor is to recall the dignity, force, and splendour of prose at its best. Yet none of these authors has produced anything to rival the book from which they drew their common inspiration.

In the other camp, though there have been many brilliant assailants, not one has surpassed, or even equalled, in the estimation of the world, the literary excellence of the book which they attacked. The mordant wit of Voltaire, the lucid and melancholy charm of Renan, have not availed to drive or draw the world away from the Bible; and the effect of all assaults has been to leave it more widely read, better understood, and more intelligently admired than ever before.

Now it must be admitted that the same thing is true, at least in some degree, of other books which are held to be sacred or quasi-sacred: they are superior to the distinctively theological literature which has grown up about them. I suppose nothing of the Mussulmans is as great as the “Koran,” nothing of the Hindus as great as the “Vedas”; and though the effect of the Confucian classics, from the literary point of view, may not have been altogether good, their supremacy in the religious library of the Chinese is unquestioned. But the singular and noteworthy thing about the influence of the Bible is the extent to which it has permeated general literature, the mark which it has made in all forms of belles-lettres. To treat this subject adequately one would need to write volumes. In this chapter I can touch but briefly on a few points of the outline as they come out in English literature.

III

In the Old-English period, the predominant influence of the Scriptures may be seen in the frequency with which the men of letters turned to them for subjects, and in the Biblical colouring and texture of thought and style. CÆdmon’s famous “Hymn” and the other poems like “Genesis,” “Exodus,” “Daniel,” and “Judith,” which were once ascribed to him; Cynewulf’s “Crist,” “The Fates of the Apostles,” “The Dream of the Rood”; Ælfric’s “Homilies” and his paraphrases of certain books of Scripture—these early fruits of our literature are all the offspring of the Bible.

In the Middle-English period, that anonymous masterpiece “Pearl” is full of the spirit of Christian mysticism, and the two poems called “Cleanness” and “Patience,” probably written by the same hand, are free and spirited versions of stories from the Bible. “The Vision of Piers the Plowman,” formerly ascribed to William Langland, but now supposed by some scholars to be the work of four or five different authors, was the most popular poem of the latter half of the fourteenth century. It is a vivid picture of the wrongs and sufferings of the labouring man, a passionate satire on the corruptions of the age in church and state, an eloquent appeal for a return to truth and simplicity. The feeling and the imagery of Scripture pervade it with a strange power and charm; in its reverence for poverty and toil it leans closely and confidently upon the example of Jesus; and at the end it makes its ploughman hero appear in some mystic way as a type, first of the crucified Saviour, and then of the church which is the body of Christ.

It was about this time, the end of the fourteenth century, that John Wyclif and his disciples, feeling the need of the support of the Bible in their work as reformers, took up and completed the task of translating it entirely into the English tongue of the common people. This rude but vigourous version was revised and improved by John Purvey. It rested mainly upon the Latin version of St. Jerome. At the beginning of the sixteenth century William Tindale made an independent translation of the New Testament from the original Greek, a virile and enduring piece of work, marked by strength and simplicity, and setting a standard for subsequent English translations. Coverdale’s version of the Scriptures was published in 1535, and was announced as made “out of Douche and Latyn”; that is to say, it was based upon the German of Luther and the Zurich Bible, and upon the Vulgate of St. Jerome; but it owed much to Tindale, to whose manly force it added a certain music of diction and grace of phrase which may still be noted in the Psalms as they are rendered in the Anglican Prayer-Book. Another translation, marked by accurate scholarship, was made by English Puritans at Geneva, and still another, characterized by a richer Latinized style, was made by English Catholics living in exile at Rheims, and was known as “the Douai Version,” from the fact that it was first published in its complete form in that city in 1609-1610.

Meantime, in 1604, a company of scholars had been appointed by King James I in England to make a new translation “out of the original tongues, and with the former translations diligently compared and revised.” These forty-seven men had the advantage of all the work of their predecessors, the benefit of all the discussion over doubtful words and phrases, and the “unearned increment” of riches which had come into the English language since the days of Wyclif. The result of their labours, published in 1611, was the so-called “Authorized Version,” a monument of English prose in its prime: clear, strong, direct, yet full of subtle rhythms and strange colours; now moving as simply as a shepherd’s song, in the Twenty-third Psalm; now marching with majestic harmonies, in the book of Job; now reflecting the lowliest forms of human life, in the Gospel stories; and now flashing with celestial splendours in the visions of the Apocalypse; vivid without effort; picturesque without exaggeration; sinewy without strain; capable alike of the deepest tenderness and the most sublime majesty; using a vocabulary of only six thousand words to build a book which, as Macaulay said, “if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.”

The literary excellence of this version, no doubt, did much to increase the influence of the Bible in literature and confirm its place as the central book in the life of those who speak and write the English tongue. Consider a few of the ways in which this influence may be traced.

IV

First of all, it has had a general effect upon English writing, helping to preserve it from the opposite faults of vulgarity and affectation. Coleridge long ago remarked upon the tendency of a close study of the Bible to elevate a writer’s style. There is a certain naturalness, inevitableness, propriety of form to substance, in the language of Scripture which communicates to its readers a feeling for the fitness of words; and this in itself is the first requisite of good writing. Sincerity is the best part of dignity.

The English of our Bible is singularly free from the vice of preciosity: it is not far-sought, overnice, elaborate. Its plainness is a rebuking contrast to all forms of euphuism. It does not encourage a direct imitation of itself; for the comparison between the original and the copy makes the latter look pale and dull. Even in the age which produced the authorized version, its style was distinct and remarkable. As Hallam has observed, it was “not the English of Daniel, of Raleigh, or Bacon.” It was something larger, at once more ancient and more modern, and therefore well fitted to become not an invariable model, but an enduring standard. Its words come to it from all sources; they are not chosen according to the foolish theory that a word of Anglo-Saxon origin is always stronger and simpler than a Latin derivative. Take the beginning of the Forty-sixth Psalm:

“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof.”

Or take this passage from the Epistle to the Romans:

“Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another; not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continuing instant in prayer; distributing to the necessity of saints; given to hospitality.”

Here is a style that adapts itself by instinct to its subject, and whether it uses Saxon words like “strength” and “help” and “love” and “hope,” or Latin words like “refuge” and “trouble” and “present” and “fervent” and “patient” and “prayer” and “hospitality,” weaves them into a garment worthy of the thought.

The literary influence of a great, popular book written in such a style is both inspiring and conservative. It survives the passing modes of prose in each generation, and keeps the present in touch with the past. It preserves a sense of balance and proportion in a language whose perils lie in its liberties and in the indiscriminate use of its growing wealth. And finally it keeps a medium of communication open between the learned and the simple; for the two places where the effect of the Bible upon the English language may be most clearly felt are in the natural speech of the plain people and in the finest passages of great authors.

V

Following this line of the influence of the Bible upon language as the medium of literature, we find, in the next place, that it has contributed to our common speech a great number of phrases which are current everywhere. Sometimes these phrases are used in a merely conventional way. They serve as counters in a long extemporaneous prayer, or as padding to a page of dull and pious prose. But at other times they illuminate the sentence with a new radiance; they clarify its meaning with a true symbol; they enhance its value with rich associations; they are “sweeter than honey and the honeycomb.”

Take for example such phrases as these: “a good old age,” “the wife of thy bosom,” “the apple of his eye,” “gathered to his fathers,” “a mother in Israel,” “a land flowing with milk and honey,” “the windows of heaven,” “the fountains of the great deep,” “living fountains of waters,” “the valley of decision,” “cometh up as a flower,” “a garden enclosed,” “one little ewe lamb,” “thou art the man,” “a still, small voice,” “as the sparks fly upward,” “swifter than a weaver’s shuttle,” “miserable comforters,” “the strife of tongues,” “the tents of Kedar,” “the cry of the humble,” “the lofty looks of man,” “the pride of life,” “from strength to strength,” “as a dream when one awaketh,” “the wings of the morning,” “stolen waters,” “a dinner of herbs,” “apples of gold in pictures of silver,” “better than rubies,” “a lion in the way,” “vanity of vanities,” “no discharge in that war,” “the little foxes that spoil the vines,” “terrible as an army with banners,” “precept upon precept, line upon line,” “as a drop of a bucket,” “whose merchants are princes,” “trodden the wine-press alone,” “the rose of Sharon and the lily of the valley,” “the highways and hedges,” “the salt of the earth,” “the burden and heat of the day,” “the signs of the times,” “a pearl of great price,” “what God hath joined together,” “the children of light,” “the powers that be,” “if the trumpet give an uncertain sound,” “the fashion of this world,” “decently and in order,” “a thorn in the flesh,” “labour of love,” “a cloud of witnesses,” “to entertain angels unawares,” “faithful unto death,” “a crown of life.” Consider also those expressions which carry with them distinctly the memory of some ancient story: “the fleshpots of Egypt,” “manna in the wilderness,” “a mess of pottage,” “Joseph’s coat,” “the driving of Jehu,” “the mantle of Elijah,” “the widow’s mite,” “the elder brother,” “the kiss of Judas,” “the house of Martha,” “a friend of publicans and sinners,” “many mansions,” “bearing the cross.” Into such phrases as these, which are familiar to us all, the Bible has poured a wealth of meaning far beyond the measure of the bare words. They call up visions and reveal mysteries.

VI

Direct, but not always accurate, quotations from Scripture and allusions to Biblical characters and events are very numerous in English literature. They are found in all sorts of books. Professor Albert T. Cook has recently counted sixty-three in a volume of descriptive sketches of Italy, twelve in a book on wild animals, and eighteen in a novel by Thomas Hardy. A special study of the Biblical references in Tennyson has been made,[2] and more than five hundred of them have been found.

Bishop Charles Wordsworth has written a book on Shakespeare’s Knowledge and Use of the Bible,[3] and shown “how fully and how accurately the general tenor of the facts recorded in the sacred narrative was present to his mind,” and “how Scriptural are the conceptions which Shakespeare had of the being and attributes of God, of His general and particular Providence, of His revelation to man, of our duty toward Him and toward each other, of human life and of human death, of time and of eternity.” It is possible that the bishop benevolently credits the dramatist with a more invariable and complete orthodoxy than he possessed. But certainly Shakespeare knew the Bible well, and felt the dramatic value of allusions and illustrations which were sure to be instantly understood by the plain people. It is his Antonio, in The Merchant of Venice, who remarks that “the Devil can cite Scripture for his purpose,” evidently referring to the Gospel story of the evil one who tried to tempt Jesus with a verse from the Psalms.

The references to the Bible in the poetry of Robert Browning have been very carefully examined by Mrs. Machen in an admirable little book.[4] It is not too much to say that his work is crowded with Scriptural quotations, allusions, and imagery. He follows Antonio’s maxim, and makes his bad characters, like Bishop Blougram and Sludge the Medium, cite from Holy Writ to cloak their hypocrisy or excuse their villainy. In his longest poem, The Ring and the Book, there are said to be more than five hundred Biblical references.

But more remarkable even than the extent to which this material drawn from the Scriptures has been used by English writers, is the striking effect which it produces when it is well used. With what pathos does Sir Walter Scott, in The Heart of Midlothian, make old Davie Deans bow his head when he sees his daughter Effie on trial for her life, and mutter to himself, “Ichabod! my glory is departed!” How magnificently does Ruskin enrich his Sesame and Lilies with that passage from Isaiah in which the fallen kings of Hades start from their thrones to greet the newly fallen with the cry, “Art thou also become weak as we? Art thou become like unto us?” How grandly do the images and thoughts of the last chapters of Deuteronomy roll through Kipling’s Recessional, with its Scriptural refrain, “Lest we forget!”

There are some works of literature in English since the sixteenth century which are altogether Biblical in subject and colouring. Chief among these in prose is The Pilgrim’s Progress of John Bunyan, and in verse, the Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonistes of John Milton. These are already classics. Some day a place near them will be given to Browning’s Saul and A Death in the Desert; but for that we must wait until their form has stood the test of time.

In general it may be observed—and the remark holds good of the works just mentioned—that a Scriptural story or poem is most likely to succeed when it takes its theme, directly or by suggestion, from the Bible, and carries it into a region of imagination, a border-realm, where the author is free to work without paraphrase or comparison with the sacred writers. It is for this reason that both Samson Agonistes and Paradise Lost are superior to Paradise Regained.

VII

The largest and most important influence of the Bible in literature lies beyond all these visible effects upon language and style and imagery and form. It comes from the strange power of the book to nourish and inspire, to mould and guide, the inner life of man. “It finds me,” said Coleridge; and the word of the philosopher is one that the plain man can understand and repeat.

The hunger for happiness which lies in every human heart can never be satisfied without righteousness; and the reason why the Bible reaches down so deep into the breast of man is because it brings news of a kingdom which is righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit. It brings this news not in the form of a dogma, a definition, a scientific statement, but in the form of literature, a living picture of experience, a perfect ideal embodied in a Character and a Life. And because it does this, it has inspiration for those who write in the service of truth and humanity.

The Bible has been the favourite book of those who were troubled and downtrodden, and of those who bore the great burden of a great task. New light has broken forth from it to lead the upward struggle of mankind from age to age. Men have come back to it because they could not do without it. Nor will its influence wane, its radiance be darkened, unless literature ceases to express the noblest of human longings, the highest of human hopes, and mankind forgets all that is now incarnate in the central figure of the Bible,—the Divine Deliverer.