which the countless millions of its readers have all felt Tc break up all these hallowed associations, to unsettle the public confidence in that "old family Bible which lies on the stand," to substitute some new and modernized Bible in its stead, cut and fashioned according to the latest style of criticism-all this, if it could be done, as we think it never can, and hope it never may, would be an unmitigated calamity to the church and the world. It would be to lose all that is precious and impressive in the fact, that the sacred book of the people is the great standard classic of the people's literature. It would be to incur all that is evil in cutting a nation's literature loose from its ancient moorings, and sending it adrift upon the ocean of endless change.

On this point we respond most heartily to the remarks of an eloquent speaker, Dr. Storrs, at a late anniversary of the American Bible Society. This old version," said he, "is hallowed. with such memories as scarcely belong to another human work. It stretches back one of its far-reaching roots to the very cell of Bede. It strikes down another beneath the burnt ashes of Wickliffe. It sends another under the funeral pile of Tyndale. It twists another around the stake where Cranmer was burned. Give up this version for a trim and varnished new one? Nay verily Those broad contorted arms have wrestled with the fierce winds of opinion for two hundred years! The sweet birds of heaven have loved to come and sing among them; and they sing there still! Their leaves are leaves of life and healing! There is not a text pendent upon those boughs but has the stuff of religions and literatures in it! They have given of their ribbed strength to every enterprise for human welfare ! Give up this version? It is our American inheritance! It came over in the Mayflower! It was brought by Oglethorpe to

Georgia! It has spread across our land! It has been the joy of generations to sit under its shadow! It will stand while the hills stand! We will not give up this oak of the Ages, for any modern tulip tree at present !"

VI. THE BIBLE IN THE FOUR GREAT CLASSIC TONGUES.

It is interesting to trace the history of the Word of God in its connection with the leading languages of civilized man. First, we find it, or the earlier part of it, in its native Hebrew, which was for ages the advanced guard of all human civilization. Next, we have it-the Old Testament nearly three centuries before the advent of Christ, and the New immediately after— in the Greek tongue, which was, for long ages more, the all-controlling language of classical antiquity. Then, again, from the days of Jerome, we find it in the imperial world-conquering Latin, which held the mastery in Europe down to the sixteenth century. And now, since the Reformation, which left it in the vernacular of all the great civilized nations of Protestant Europe, we have it above all others, in this unparalleled English, which, to say the least, is the leading language of modern Christendom; which is doing more than all others put together to spread the true gospel of God, and with it civilization, among the tribes and peoples of the heathen world.

There have been four great languages, which have successively held the foremost place in transmitting and diffusing civi lization over the globe-Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and English. And it is one of the grandest facts in the history of literature, that the Word of God has held the place of supremacy in each of them, as its sacred canonical book. Assuredly, no other reli

gious book-no book whatever-has ever had such a history. If there were no other argument for the book, this fact would be enough that at the head of these four languages, it has led the march of civilization around the globe.

Of two of these great Bible-transmitting languages, the second and third, we have seen a vivid portraiture by Coleridge, in the following terms: "Greek, the shrine of the genius of the old world; as universal as our race, as individual as ourselves; of infinite flexibility, of indefatigable strength, with the complication and the distinctness of nature herself f; to which nothing was vulgar, from which nothing was excluded; speaking to the car like Italian, speaking to the mind like English ; with words like pictures; with words like the gossamer film of the summer; at once the variety and picturesqueness of Homer, the gloom and the intensity of Eschylus ; not compressed to the closest by Thucydides, not fathomed to the bottom by Plato, not sounding with all its thunders, nor lit up with all its ardors, even under the Promethean touch of Demosthenes! And Latin, the voice of empire and of war, of law and of the state; inferior to its half-parent and rival in the embodying of passion and in the distinguishing of thought, but equal to it in sustaining the measured march of history, and superior to it in the indignant declamation of moral satire; stamped with the mark of an imperial and despotizing republic; rigid in its construction, parsimonious in its synonyms; reluctantly yielding to the flowery yoke of Horace, although opening glimpses of Greek-like splendor in the occasional inspirations of Lucretius; proved, indeed, to the uttermost by Cicero, and by him found wanting; yet majestic in its barrenness, instinct with the spirit of nations, and not with the passions of individuals; breathing the maxims of the world, and not the tenets of the

schools; one and uniform in its air and spirit, whether touched by the stern and haughty Sallust, by the open and discursive Livy, by the reserved and thoughtful Tacitus."

If we might adopt a similar style in order to complete the picture of the four great languages, which have in turn become the depositaries and disseminators of the Word of God, we should describe the first of all, the stately and giant-built Hebrew, as the most simple, the most symmetrical, and the most ancient of written tongues; with letters like blocks of granite, with words like king's palaces, with sentences like cities walled. up to heaven; though robed in the beauties of holiness, yet rugged as the mountains about Jerusalem; unchangeable in its idiom, unyielding in its structure, unvarying and solemn in its tone, from generation to generation the language of truth and judgment, of adoration and obedience; spoken first in the garden of Eden, or by the builders of Babel, proclaimed from heaven at Sinai, and written on tables of stone by the finger of Jehovah; forever preserving its awful dignity, whether sung by the Seraphim above, or by the choirs of the temple, whether carried to the highest heaven of sublimity by Isaiah, or brought down to play amongst the roses of Sharon and the lilies of the valley by Solomon; yet destitute alike of the elasticity of the Greek and the martial spirit of the Latin, unfitted to skirmish with the one, or charge with the other, but ever marching with the slow and measured tread of an ancient army of elephants.

If such be the Hebrew, the tongue of primeval revelation, and Greek, the tongue of unaided genius, and Latin, the tongue of conquest and empire-what shall we say of this last and mightiest stronghold of the Bible—this English of the old world and the new, of all the sciences, and all the arts, and all the encyclopedias-this English, not of the manuscript and

cloister, but of the printing press, the telegraph, the steam-car, spreading the light of liberty and salvation around the globethis English of commerce, of education, of colonization, of the Missionary, the Sunday School and Bible Society-this universal Anglo-American speech, whose dominion is wider and mightier than any king or conqueror could ever boast! Strong in the deep foundations of those old Saxon elements, which underlie it as the mountain granite underlies the surface of the earth; rich in the accumulated deposits and formations derived from the influx and commingling of other languages; quickened into life and beauty by the constant culture of more than a thousand years; breathing everywhere the energy and lofty spirit of the hardiest, most heroic race on the face of the earth; combining, all in one, the original grandeur of the Hebrew, the gracefulness of the Greek, and the martial might of the Roman tongue; with matchless ease incorporating into itself images of beauty and sublimity from every monument of ancient art, from every production of modern genius, from every discovery of science in the earth, the air, the seas and skies— now in prose, and now in poetry, adjusting itself to the impersonation and the utterance of every passion and every conception of man—now bursting forth in stern and awful rebuke from the lips of Cromwell and the men of the Commonwealth, and now singing Hosannas to the pomp and circumstance of royalty in the writers of the Restoration-now, in the thunder-tones of reformers and martyrs, denouncing the wrath of God against an ungodly world, and now, in strains as sweet as angels use, whispering the gospel of peace to the hearers of Leighton and Flavel, Wesley and Whitfield, Cecil and Newton-now soaring on adventurous wing with the bard of Paradise Lost to the very throne of Deity, and now with the Pilgrim of Bunyan treading