The Wonder of the Bible
from The Music of Language, by J. Campbell-McInnes

The Bible in English is the literature, and largely the spoken language of some 170 millions of people, and its language is said to affect a total of some 300 millions. If we overlook the influence of the Bible upon English speaking peoples, we overlook their religious, moral, and literary history. Compared to other peoples who read the Bible but little, in English speaking countries, and in England especially, it rooted itself down as a native tree, and became, as it were, the nation's daily bread. The English people instinctively and with one accord, took it to their hearts.

As Professor MacNeile Dixon has said, "By comparison, the other European countries knew it only through intermediaries. By some strange dispensation, it fell to us as our spiritual portion, and divides us from the rest."

"Consider," wrote Huxley, "the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this book has been woven into the life of all that is noblest and best in English history, that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is as familiar to noble and simple as Dante and Tasso once were to the Italians: that it is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of pure literary form: and finally that it forbids the veriest villager, who never left his village, to be ignorant of other countries and other civilizations, and of a great past stretching back to the furthest limits of the oldest civilizations of the world."

No attempt can be made to estimate the power of the Bible on the British character or on the English language. It has been read by millions gone by, of whose households it was the only book they possessed. It sank deep into their minds: read aloud at home and in churches it saturated and coloured all their thoughts, steeped itself into their daily conversation, and shaped in their activities their future history.

Indeed, without our even knowing it, or whether we are attending Church or not, we are unconsciously quoting the Bible, which the English church gave to us, for hardly a day passes without our mouths and lips using its musical mintage in the living voice, by such phrases as "clear as crystal," "a labour of love," "highways and hedges," "hip and thigh," "lick the dust," "the shadow of death," "a broken reed," "the eleventh hour," "the root of all evil," "the fat of the land," "coals of fire," "a word in season"

Here are words with associations in sound and sense, which mingle in our lives with our hopes and fears, our joys and sorrows. We must cultivate the awareness that the language of the Bible is not only the people ' s religion in sense, it is also their literature in sound.