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But further, there is
THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE ON LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
Considerable as has been its influence on Art and Music, its influence on Language and Literature has been vastly greater. But for the Bible the English Language, and English Literature, as we know them, would never have been. Prof. Quiller-Couch, lecturing at Cambridge University, said:
“The Scriptures in our Authorized Version are part and parcel of English Literature,” and “the most majestic thing in our Literature,” “a well of English undefiled.”
And again,
“The Authorized Version has set a seal on our natural style, thinking, and speaking”; “it is in everything we see, hear, and feel, because it is in us, in our blood.”
And J. R. Green, in his History of the English People, says:
“As a mere literary monument, the English Version of the Bible remains the noblest example of the English tongue, while its perpetual use made it, from the instant of its appearance, the standard of our language.”
And Macaulay said of the English Bible:
“If everything else in our language should perish, it would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.”
Try to imagine, then, what would happen if the Bible and all its influences were obliterated! It would mean that all copies of Bible manuscripts would disappear, and consequently all Scripture quotations and references in the writings of the Church Fathers; all Versions of the Bible also, the Bishops’, the Authorized, and the Revised; and all translations of the Bible, which are in over 1,000 languages and dialects; and in consequence, of course, so would all agencies for the circulation of the Scriptures, the British and Foreign Bible Society, the National Bible Society of Scotland, the Hibernian Bible Society, and the Trinitarian; all Bible Societies in Europe, and in America, and all similar agencies throughout the world.
All these would go, and with them, all the influences they have exerted on the mind and heart and will of uncounted millions of people, of all nations, and kindreds, and tongues, and all their effects upon social and national life everywhere.
But what if the Bible and all its influences were to be expunged from English Literature, that, for instance, of the Elizabethan and Victorian periods! Could anyone assess the loss?
MILTON’s Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained would completely disappear, for the one is about the Fall in Eden, and the other is about Christ’s victory over the devil in the wilderness. Could we afford to lose these masterpieces, as literature? And think of SHAKESPEARE’S works. Bishop Wordsworth wrote in 1864:
“Take the entire range of English literature; put together our best authors, who have written upon subjects not professedly religious or theological, and we shall not find, I believe, in them all united, so much evidence of the Bible having been read and used, as we have found in Shakespeare alone.”
And a more recent writer has said that “Shakespeare definitely made identifiable quotations from or allusions to at least forty-two books of the Bible.”
There are many passages in Shakespeare which cannot be understood by anyone who is not acquainted with the Bible. Such references are found in Hamlet, As You Like It, Richard III, King Henry IV, All’s Well, and in numerous shorter works.
And what about BUNYAN? But for the Bible, do you suppose we would ever have heard of the Bedford tinker? Bunyan’s contribution to style and to literature is due entirely to the Authorized Version of our Bible, which he so imbibed, and in which he so soaked, that the only way he could write was Biblically. This unlettered man produced 60 works, longer and shorter, one for each year of his life. The elimination of many of these would not mean serious loss, but the Life and Death of Mr. Badman, Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, the Holy War, and, greatest of them all, the Pilgrim’s Progress, “final flower of Puritan theology and experience,” these are part of the English Language, and of English Literature. This masterpiece, the Pilgrim’s Progress, has been translated into no fewer than 108 languages and dialects, and has become a part of the thought-stock of an uncountable multitude of people.
What a tragic gap would be made in literature by the elimination of Bunyan’s characters; Christian, Evangelist, Obstinate, Pliable, Prudence, Talkative, By-Ends, Hopeful, Great-Heart, Ready-to-Halt, and many others! Of this book Gosse says: “It is the matchless and inimitable crystallization into imaginative art of the whole system of Puritan Protestantism”; and, remember, it is based squarely on the Bible.
But these are not isolated instances of the Bible’s influence in literature. Herbert, Crashaw, Quarles, Spenser, and Addison must be added to those who in the 16th and 17th centuries were indebted to the Bible. Francis Bacon has more than 70 allusions to the Bible in his Essays. And it can be safely claimed that all that is best in the Victorian period gives evidence of this influence, which, were it extracted from the writings of Wordsworth, and Tennyson, and Browning, and Carlyle, and Ruskin, and Cowper, and Coleridge, and Burns, and Scott, and Thackeray, and George Eliot, and Dickens, and Reade, and Stevenson, and the Brontes, and Hawthorne, and Longfellow, and Southey, and many more, would so impair them as, in some instances, to ruin them. An index of Bible references in the writings of Ruskin makes a volume of over 300 pages; and in Van Dyke’s book on Tennyson is a list of the poet’s Bible quotations and allusions which covers 24 pages.
For over 1200 years the Bible has been an active force in English literature, and during the whole period it has been moulding the diction of representative thinkers and literary artists. With the obliteration of the Bible all that would go, with the result that we would not have a literature at all.
And all the religious classics would go also: the Devotions of Lancelot Andrewes; Keble’s Christian Year; the Imitation of Christ, by Thomas à Kempis; the Thoughts of Pascal; the Saint’s Rest, by Richard Baxter; the Confessions of Augustine; Holy Living, and Holy Dying, by Jeremy Taylor; the Serious Call, by William Law; the Cardiphonia, by John Newton; Rutherford’s Letters, and hundreds more; for, but for the Bible, these things could never have been written, or thought.
And, to an extent which is not appreciated, the language of the Bible has entered into our common speech, and all the time terms are being employed by the people, the origin of which, for the most part, they do not know.
Illustration of this is seen in such expressions as, highways and byways; hip and thigh; arise as one man; lick the dust; a broken reed; the root of all evil; weighed and found wanting; the sweat of his brow; a word in season; heap coals of fire; a pearl of great price; the burden and heat of the day; wars and rumours of wars; an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth; casting pearls before swine; and hundreds more. These are often used in a sense quite false, and entirely opposed to their original meaning; but that only demonstrates the influence of the Bible where it is least intended or expected.
When we sing, God Save the King, we are using Bible language (1 Sam. x. 24). The inscription over the front portico of the Royal Exchange is from Psalm xxiv, “The earth is the LORD’s and the fulness thereof.” The University of Oxford has for its motto, Dominus illuminatio mea, which is from Psalm xxvii. Truly in the very fabric and fibre of our life is this Book of books.
And now, for a moment, let us think of
THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE ON BELIEF
Everybody believes something, if it is only that he believes nothing. It is not humanly possible not to believe. The heretic believes that he is orthodox; and even the lunatic believes that he is sane.
But when we come to Christian belief, we are face to face with monuments of theological thought, representing the progress of the Church’s Faith; a Faith which expresses itself in Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms, These have been of the substance of Christian thought for 1600 years.
One needs only to name - the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, the Te Deum Laudamus; the Augsburg Confession, the Westminster Confession; the Catechisms of Geneva, and Heidelberg; the Larger, and the Shorter Westminster Catechisms - to indicate the wealth of theological thought which is the Church’s heritage.
But these Statements of Faith - and there are many more - are based on the Bible, and if it and all its influences were obliterated, all these summaries of the Truth would disappear, and with them the Christian Church, for, but for these Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms, there would never have been any personal faith, any public testimony, any doctrinal vindication, any authoritative dogma, any test of orthodoxy, or any standard of discipline; everyone would have believed, and said, and done “that which was right in his own eyes”; and where would that have landed us!
Had there been no Bible, would we ever have heard of Irenaeus, and Justin Martyr, and Tertullian; of the two Clements, and Origen, and Athanasius, and Basil, and Augustine, and Jerome; of Aquinas, and Calvin, and Luther, and Zwingli?
And had there been no Bible and no beliefs, the noble army of martyrs would never have existed. Wild beasts would have lost many a meal in Roman arenas; Inquisition racks would never have been stained with the blood of Christian confessors; nor would fire flames in London, Oxford, and Edinburgh ever have licked human flesh.
If the Bible had never been written, women like Perpetua, and Felicitas, and Blandina, and Margaret Lachlan, and Margaret Wilson would never have glorified the history of courage. Nor would we ever have heard of Savonarola, and Huss, and Latimer, and Ridley, and Cranmer, and Tyndale, and thousands of others “of whom the world was not worthy.”
Only for deep convictions would people suffer as the saints have suffered, and those convictions could have grown in no other soil than that of the Bible; but if there had been no such Book, there would have been no such sufferings, because there would have been no such convictions for which to suffer.
And who can estimate
THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE ON SOCIAL REFORM
It has been a charge against evangelicalism that it has no social passion, that its pursuit of the salvation of souls excludes interest in the salvation of society. Nothing could be further from the truth than such a charge, and they who make it only advertise their colossal ignorance. Social reform in our own and other countries owes more to evangelicalism than to any other influence.
It was John Wesley, William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, Granville Sharp, Fowell Buxton, and Abraham Lincoln who fought the slave traffic, and they were all evangelicals. It was John Howard and Elizabeth Fry, both evangelicals, who championed the cause of prison reform. To the memory of that great reformer, Lord Shaftesbury, a pioneer emancipator of industrial England, and also an evangelical, stands the Eros Monument in Piccadilly Circus, purchased with the pennies of the grateful poor.
It was John B. Gough, Frances Willard, and Sir Wilfred Lawson - all evangelicals - who attacked the entrenched interests of the drink traffic, and whose labours resulted in many Temperance Societies for both old and young. It was Robert Raikes, an evangelical, who inaugurated Sunday Schools in this country, which, says J. R. Green, “were the beginnings of popular education.” It was Benjamin Waugh, George Muller, William Quarrier, C. H. Spurgeon, J. W. C. Fegan, and T. J. Barnardo, all pronounced evangelicals, who espoused the cause of the children, and established Orphanages in England and Scotland which are flourishing at the present time.
It was William and Catherine Booth who brought into being the vast and world-wide organization of the Salvation Army. Sir George Williams originated the Young Men’s Christian Association. Arthur Broome founded the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (R.S.P.C.A.); and Florence Nightingale was the great reformer of hospital nursing. All these were outstanding evangelicals, and deeply-rooted believers in the Word of God.
But if there had been no such Word there would have been no such benefactors and benefactions, and this country would at this time be sunken in the most incredible bestialities, as indeed it was, in the earlier half of the eighteenth century, before the Evangelical Revival, as Dr. Bready has shown in his book, England, Before and After Wesley.
And we must not omit to refer to
THE INFLUENCE OF THE BIBLE ON PREACHING AND REVIVALS
Do we realize that if there had been no Bible there would have been no Christian preachers, or teachers, or commentators, or Biblical scholars; for there would have been nothing to preach, nothing to teach, and nothing to investigate! But look at this a little more in detail.
Had there been no Bible there would have been no Preachers, for preaching owes its existence to revealed religion. Had God never spoken to men, they never would have had anything to preach, and so the possibility of any record of preaching would have disappeared, and the necessity for Theological Colleges and Bible Institutes from the time of Samuel to the present day, would never have existed.
As preaching from the time of Christ to the present time has been dependent on His incarnation, life, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension, and as this supreme revelation has for its background the whole of the Old Testament, it is easy to see that if the Bible had never been written, we would never have had any knowledge of preaching under either the Old Covenant, or in the time of Christ, or in the Apostolic age; and without all this, preaching from the close of the first century A.D. would have had neither foundation norsubstance, and, needless to say, the loss through these nearly nineteen hundred years would have been incalculable and calamitous.
We would never have heard of the warning words of Enoch and Noah, the instructions of Moses, the testimony of Joshua, nor of the challenge of Elijah. The seraphic utterances of Isaiah would never have reached us:
“Seek ye the LORD while He may be found,
Call ye upon Him while He is near;
Let the wicked forsake his way,
And the unrighteous man his thoughts;
And let him return unto the LORD,
And He will have mercy upon him;
And to our God,
For He will abundantly pardon.”
We would never have listened to the tender pathos of Jeremiah and Hosea; to the denunciations of Amos, and Micah, and Malachi; nor to the encouragements of Ezekiel and Zechariah. We would have been entirely ignorant of the preaching of John the Baptist, and Peter, and Stephen, and Paul; and what would be a more grievous loss than all beside, we would never have heard the words of the greatest of all preachers:
“Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give yourest.”
“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.”
I am the Resurrection and the Life; he that believeth in Me, though he were dead, yet shall he live; and whosoever liveth and believeth in Me, shall never die.”
Scores of suchlike utterances, which are in the warp and woof of Christian thinking and experience, would never have been known, if there had been no Bible.
We would have remained strangers also to the eloquence of Ambrose, and Chrysostom, and Jeremy Taylor, and Chalmers, to the profound thought of Athanasius, and Augustine, and Calvin; to the conscience-smiting pleading of Luther, and Wesley, and Knox; and to the passionate evangelism of Whitefield, and Spurgeon, and Moody. And to these great names we must add those of: Bernard, and Eckhart, and Tauler, and Sibbs, and Baxter; Owen, and Bunyan; Hooker and Donna and Fuller; McCheyne, and Caird, and Matheson; Dale, and Parker, and Morley Punshon, and Maclaren; F. W. Robertson; J. H. Newman, and H. P. Liddon; Christmas Evans, John Evans, and William Williams; Vinet, and Godet, and Monod; and Tholuck; Jonathan Edwards, and Finney, and Phillips Brooks; Beecher, and Bushnell, and a host of others down to this hour. Had there been no Bible there would have been no Campbell Morgan, preacher and teacher, and tens of thousands of people would never have sat in this Church, listening to him expounding the Word of Life. And, of course, if there had been no preachers, and teachers, and spiritual leaders, there would have been no cathedrals, or churches, or chapels, or mission halls; but the land would have been full of gin palaces, casinos, and brothels.
All this ministry owed its existence to the fact and substance of the Bible, and had the Book never been, these men and their messages would never have been.
And what in a passing moment can we say about Revivals? It has been thought that the Christian Church exists, as a motor car is worked, upon a succession of explosions. It is a fact, at any rate, that in the history of the Christian Church a law of periodicity, in this matter of revivals, is discernible. This law is implicit in all progress. There are times of ebb and times of flow in poetry, and art, and literature, and learning, and science, and commerce; and it would be strange indeed if there were no such times in spiritual experience. But the fact is, there have been religious revivals throughout all ages, and these, we may see, have been essential to spiritual progress.
Revival is a re-awakening to something that has been forgotten, a flourishing again of something that appears to be dying, a stimulus of attention and interest in something that has been neglected; and this, I say, has characterized the history of religion for millenniums. We have illustrations of it in the time of Moses, of Samuel, of Hezekiah, of Jonah, and of Ezra and Nehemiah.
In the first century Pentecost was a mighty leap forward in the spiritual experience of men. In the fifth century Chrysostom’s preaching of the cross enraptured multitudes in Constantinople.
In the twelfth century the Waldenses, in the Piedmont valleys of the Alps, were preaching the simplicity, purity, and authority of the Gospel; and notwithstanding persecution, they became the chief evangelists of Italy. In the same century, and also in Italy, Francis of Assisi, by example and proclamation, was succeeding in calling men from the indulgence, deadness, and papal absolutism of the Medieval Church.
In the fourteenth century Wycliffe fought, almost single-handed, for purity of worship, and to make the people of England familiar with the Bible, and in this ministry he anticipated and prepared for the Reformation.
In the fifteenth century Savonarola was proclaiming his message of sin and redemption to great effect in Florence, arousing the people from their moral stagnancy and turpitude.
In the sixteenth century, Luther, in Germany, Calvin in Switzerland, and Knox in Scotland, were, in different ways, making religious history, and the results have been seen and felt ever since. Calvin’s great message centred in the truth of God’s sovereignty, and is embodied in his Institutes; and Luther’s great message centred in the truth of Justification by Faith in Christ alone, and its abiding expression is in Protestantism. John Knox in Scotland, with tremendous power, attacked the ignorance, superstition, and tyranny of his time by proclaiming emancipation in Christ. His uncompromising and fiery ministry gave to Scotland a national life and a national Church, and made religion the dominating factor in the common life of the people.
Then, in the eighteenth century came the great Evangelical Revival under the ministries of the Wesleys and Whitefield, John the theologian, Charles the poet, and George the evangelist. This movement changed the face of England, not only spiritually, but also socially, politically, and educationally, and the effects of it are still with us.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century came the movement inspired instrumentally by Moody and Sankey, a movement which stirred the whole of the British Isles; which brought salvation and spiritual renewal to multitudes of people, and a great impetus to missionary work abroad.
And at the beginning of the twentieth century revival again visited Wales, which, among other benefits, resulted in a diminution of drunkenness, an abandonment of feuds, and the restitution of property.
Who can compute the compelling and restraining power for good of all this preaching, and all these revivals! Yet, had there been no Bible there would have been none of it, and instead of spiritual renewal there would have been a deepening and damning degradation. But for the Bible there would have been no revivals of religion, for there would have been no religion to revive. But for the Bible the world would have been, and would still be, a loathsome reeking charnel-house.
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