8 March: Boreham on the Bible

Immensities of History
It is pleasant to notice that there were many celebrations yesterday of the fact that it was on March 7, 1804 that the British and Foreign Bible Society was founded.[1] The churches naturally noticed the event; but, in this respect, there is no reason why the churches should have things all to themselves. The Bible concerns us all. No single factor has had more to do with the creation of our literature, with the moulding of our legislation, and with the determination of our way of life. The minstrelsy of all the world's poets is rooted in the work of these ancient seers and singers; the statutes of all civilised peoples are based on the inflexible mandates of the Mosaic code; whilst all the chivalries and courtesies of life are the natural expression in human conduct of these immemorial ethics and ideals.

Immensity is magnificent medicine; that is one reason why our doctors send us to the seaside. We forget the tiny in the contemplation of the tremendous; we lose life's shallow worries in the vision of immeasurable expanses and unfathomable depths. "I loved to walk until I could see the open water," exclaims the baffled and frustrated Mark Rutherford. "The sea was a corrective to the littleness all around me." When we miss a train, or mislay a letter, or find a social programme spoiled by rain, it exercises a steadying effect upon the nerves to reflect that Orion and the Pleiades still roll, Niagara still flows, Mt. Everest still wraps his clouds about him, daring a conqueror to tread his summit. The big things are as the big things always were.

The Evolution Of A Perfect Language
The Bible richly deserves its place among these monumental immensities. In a sense it grows greater with the passage of the years. When the greybeards of today were in their cradles, the Scriptures had been translated into about two hundred languages; today they are published in a thousand. It is, indeed, not only great; it is infectious in its greatness; it imparts stateliness and splendour to everything it touches. The three periods of human history with which it stands most intimately related have come to be recognised as three of the most momentous eras that our little world has known. They represent the Rise of Greek Culture, the Renaissance in Europe, and the Evangelical Revival of the 18th Century. One may search the archives of mankind from the dawn of creation to this very hour without unearthing records that can put these three classical periods to shame. And each of the three finds its enduring monument in the existence of the sacred volume that the churches will magnify on Bible Sunday.

Dean Alford, perhaps the outstanding authority on the subject, declares that one of the most arresting coincidences of all time is the evolution of the Greek tongue during the years immediately preceding the Christian era. In the fairest portion of the south of Europe, amidst the indented coasts and rocky valleys and snow-clad ranges of Greece, there grew to perfection, Alford says, the most beautiful, fluent, and powerful language that ever flowed from the tongues of man. Among the brilliant intellectuals of Athens it received its edge and polish. In it, as in no other tongue known to men, the most minute turns of human thought found expression. Truths requiring almost microscopic mental discernment were exquisitely conveyed by it. It was a precision instrument of the finest possible quality. And, to add to its charms, it was an attractive and melodious language, charming the ear with its liquid music as well as gratifying the mind by its philological subtlety. Spread across the world by the conquests of Alexander the Great, himself a pupil of Aristotle and a writer of renown, humanity found itself in possession of a perfect vehicle for its thought at the very moment at which the most startling revelation of all time was about to be made.

The World Assumes A New Complexion
The European Renaissance transfigured the lives of all nations, including our own. In those days as Sir Sidney Lee avers, English people breathed a new atmosphere. They came, he says, under a new stimulus, compounded of many elements, each of them inspiring, almost intoxicating. New continents had been discovered, new oceans sighted. The entire atlas had been recast; the world had assumed an entirely new shape. Astronomy had been born again; new inventions had revolutionised commerce and industry. It was a regeneration of the human intellect. Men felt a passion for extending the limits of knowledge. In this welter of reconstruction, two movements, each supplementary to the other, stand out conspicuously. The one is Caxton's epoch-making introduction of printing; the other is Tyndale's translation of the Bible into the English language. The immensity of the volume became the natural reflection of the immensity of the age.

The third of these magnificences of history was the great evangelical revival that, in the 18th Century, exercised an influence so overwhelming, so dynamic and so irresistible that it transformed, fundamentally and permanently, every phase of our national life. In days when ancient thrones were tottering and hoary institutions crumbling, it preserved for us, as Lecky has shown, our national integrity and respect. Men saw the affairs of this world, and of every other, in a new perspective. In the sweep of this mountainous and memorable movement, all our great missionary societies sprang into being and a desire was created to give every man living a copy of the Scriptures in his own tongue. As a result, millions of tons of Bibles, in hundreds of grotesque and apparently fantastic languages, were shipped and borne to every lonely rock and remote oasis on which humans had made their abode. The sheer vastness of such an achievement possesses a tonic value for workers in every field of humanitarian enterprise and the churches are thoroughly justified in recounting, so notable an exploit tomorrow.

F W Boreham

Image: Holy Bible

[1] This editorial appeared in the Hobart Mercury on September 10, 1949, the day before the observance of Bible Sunday in Australia.