THE AUTHORISED VERSION OF THE BIBLE.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THZ "SPECTATOR."]
SIR,—An article in your issue of March 11th admirably ex- presses the sense of the recent letters to the Times in which
Canon Beeching has dwelt on the unique charm of language in the Authorised Version of our English Bible. Your readers may be glad to be reminded of words in which the same charm was referred to some years ago by the Rev. F. W, Faber, a former member of our own Church, but who had then recently joined the Roman communion :-
" Who will not say that the uncommon beauty and marvellous English of the Protestant Bible is not one of the great strongholds of heresy in this country It lives on the ear, like a music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells, which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the
national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments, and all that there has been about him of soft and gentle and pure and penitent and good
speaks to him for ever out of his English Bible It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed and controversy never soiled. In the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant, with one spark of religiousness about him, whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible."
The above occurs in Faber's essay on " The Interest and Characteristics of the Lives of the Saints," prefixed to the Life of S. Francis of Assisi, in the Oratory Series of the Lives of Modern Saints, vol. XXV., page 116. The passage was quoted by Archbishop Trench in his "Lectures on English Past and Present" (4th ed., p. 33), where the Archbishop institutes an interesting comparison between our own Version of the Bible and the Version then accepted by the Church of Rome.
Atheneum Club.
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