much work to translate it well-favoredly, so that it have the same grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding with it in the Latin and as it hath in the Hebrew. A thousand parts better may it be translated into the English than into the Latin.

[MARSH, Lectures on the English Language, Lectures 4 and 28.]

When an intelligent foreigner commences the study of English, he finds every page sprinkled with words whose form unequivocally betrays a Greek or Latin origin. . . . Further study would teach him that he had overrated the importance and relative amount of the foreign ingredients; that many of our seemingly insignificant and barbarous consonantal monosyllables are pregnant with the mightiest thoughts, and alive with the deepest feeling; that the language of the purposes and the affections, of the will and of the heart, is genuine English-born; that the dialect of the market and the fireside is Anglo-Saxon; that the vocabulary of the most impressive and effective pulpit orators has been almost wholly drawn from the same pure source; that the advocate who would convince the technical judge, or dazzle and confuse the jury, speaks Latin; while he who would touch the better sensibilities of his audience, or rouse the multitude to vigorous action, chooses his words from the native speech of our ancient fatherland; that the domestic tongue is a language of passion and persuasion, the foreign, of authority, or of rhetoric and debate; that we may not only frame single sentences, but speak for hours, without employing a single imported word; and finally that we possess the entire volume of divine revelation in the truest, clearest, aptest form in which human ingenuity has made it accessible to modern man, and yet with a vocabulary wherein, saving proper names and terms not in their nature translatable, scarce seven words in the hundred are derived from any foreign source.

The general result of a comparison between the diction of the English Bible and that of the secular literature of England is that we have had, from the very dawn of our literature, a sacred and a profane dialect, the former eminently native, idiomatic, vernacu

lar, and permanent, the latter composite, heterogeneous, irregular, and fluctuating; the one pure, natural, and expressive, the other mixed, and comparatively distorted and conventional. . . .

It will generally be found that the passages of the Received Version whose diction is most purely Saxon are not only most forcible in expression, but also the most faithful transcripts of the text, and that a Latinized style is seldom employed without loss of beauty of language, and at the same time of exactness in correspondence.

The subjects of the Testaments, Old and New, are taken from very primitive and inartificial life. With the exception of the writings of Paul, and in a less degree of Luke, there is little evidence of literary culture or of a wide and varied range of thought in their authors. They narrate plain facts, and they promulgate doctrines, profound indeed, but addressed less to the speculative and discursive than to the moral and spiritual faculties, and hence, whatever may have been the capabilities of Hebrew and of classical Greek for other purposes, the vocabulary of the whole Bible is narrow in extent, and extremely simple in character. Now in the early part of the sixteenth century, when the development of our religious dialect was completed, the English mind and the English language were generally in a state of culture much more analogous to that of the people and the tongues of Palestine, than they have been at any subsequent period. Two centuries later, the native speech had been greatly subtilized, if not refined. Good vernacular words had been supplanted by foreign intruders, comprehensive ideas and their vocabulary had been split up into artificially discriminated thoughts and a corresponding multitude and variety of terms. The language in fact had become too copious and too specific to have any true correspondences with so simple and inartificial a diction as that of the Christian Scriptures. Had the Bible then for the first time appeared in an English dress, the translators would have been perplexed and confounded with the multitude of terms, each expressing a fragment, few the whole, of the meaning of the original words for which they must stand; and whereas three hundred years ago but one

good translation was possible, the eighteenth century might have produced a dozen, none altogether good, but none much worse than another. . . .

...

The critical study of English has but just commenced. We are at the beginning of a new era in its history. Great as are its powers, men are beginning to feel that its necessities are still greater. There is among its authors an evident stretching out for additional facilities of expression, and as a means to this end a deeper reaching down into the wells of its latent capabilities, and hence, as I have so often remarked, a more general and zealous study of those ancient forms of English, out of which was built up the consecrated dialect of our mother tongue.

4. Rhetorical Features of Biblical Language.

[SOUTH, Christ's Promise the Support of his Despised Ministers.]

For the ability of speaking conferred upon the apostles. It was highly requisite that those who were to be the interpreters and spokesmen of heaven should have a rhetoric taught them from thence too, and as much beyond any that could be taught them by human rules and art as the subjects they were to speak of surpassed the subject of all human eloquence.

Now this ability of speech, I conceive, was to be attended with these three properties of it:

1. Great clearness and perspicuity.

2. An unaffected plainness and simplicity. And,

3. A suitable and becoming zeal or fervor. And,

1. For its perspicuity. Christ and his apostles well knew that the great truth delivered by them would support itself, and that barely to deliver it would be abundantly sufficient to enforce it, nakedness, of all things, being never able to make truth ashamed. There was nothing false, faulty, or suspicious in it, and therefore they were not afraid to venture it in the plainest and most intelligible language. Where, indeed, the thing to be spoken is unwarrantable, and the design of the speaker as bad or worse, there

I confess every word may need a cloak of obscurity both to cover and protect it too; but truth and worth neither need nor affect to keep out of sight, nor the lights of the world to wrap themselves in a cloud. The apostles never taught men to preach or pray in an unknown tongue, nor valued such devotion as had ignorance for its parent. Christ still closed his instructions to his disciples with this question, 'Do ye understand these things?' And we find no parable but the rear of it is brought up with an explication. For even when Christ and his apostles preached the most mysterious truths of religion, yet then, though the thing uttered might nonplus their reason, the way and manner of their uttering it was plain, easy, and familiar, and the hearer never put to study when it was his business only to hear and understand. The oracles of Christ were not like those of Apollo, doubtful and ambiguous, always made to deceive, and commonly to destroy; but, on the contrary, as the grand business of our Saviour and his apostles after him was to teach, and that chiefly in order to persuade, so they well knew that there could be no effectual passage into the will but through the judgment, nor any free admission into the former but by a full passport from the latter. And therefore we find not that in their sermons they were for amusing or astonishing their auditory with difficult nothings, rabbinical whimseys, and remote allusions, which no man of sense and solid reason can hear without weariness and contempt.

Besides that, if we look into the reason of the thing itself, it will be found that all obscurity of speech is resolvable into the confusion and disorder of the speaker's thoughts: for as thoughts are properly the images and representations of objects to the mind, and words the representations of our thoughts to others, it must needs follow that all faults or defects in a man's expressions must presuppose the same in his notions first.

In short, nothing in nature can be imagined more absurd, irrational, and contrary to the very design and end of speaking, than an obscure discourse; for in that case the preacher may as well leave his tongue, and his auditors their ears behind them, as neither he communicate, nor they understand, any more of his

mind and meaning, after he has spoken to them, than they did before.

And yet, as ridiculous as such fustian bombast from the pulpit is, none are so transported and pleased with it as those who least understand it. For still the greatest admirers of it are the grossest, the most ignorant and illiterate country people, who of all men are the fondest of high-flown metaphors and allegories, attended and set off with scraps of Greek and Latin, though not able even to read so much of the latter as might save their necks upon occasion.

But laying aside all such studied, insignificant trifles, it was the clearness of the apostles' preaching which rendered it victorious and irresistible. And this we may rest upon as certain, that he is still the powerfullest preacher and the best orator who can make himself best understood. But,

2. A second property of the ability of speech conferred by Christ upon his apostles was its unaffected plainness and simplicity; it was to be easy, obvious, and familiar; with nothing in it strained or far-fetched; no affected scheme, or airy fancies, above the reach or relish of an ordinary apprehension; no, nothing of all this; but their grand subject was truth, and consequently above all these petty arts and poor additions, as not being capable of any greater lustre or advantage than to appear just as it is. For there is a certain majesty in plainness; as the proclamation of a prince never frisks it in tropes or fine conceits, in numerous and well-turned periods, but commands in sober, natural expressions. A substantial beauty, as it comes out of the hands of nature, needs neither paint nor patch things never made to adorn, but to cover something that would be hid. It is with expression, and the clothing of a man's conceptions, as with the clothing of a man's body. All dress and ornament supposes imperfection, as designed only to supply the body with something from without, which it wanted, but had not of its own. Gaudery is a pitiful and a mean thing, not extending further than the surface of the body; nor is the highest gallantry considerable to any, but to those who would hardly be considered without it; for in that case in