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ings which that Version has conferred on the nation or nations drawing spiritual life from it,—a blessing not small in itself, but only small by comparison with the infinitely higher blessings whereof it is the vehicle to them, is the happy wisdom, the instinctive tact with which its authors have steered between any futile mischievous attempt to ignore the full rights of the Latin part of the language on the one side, and on the other any burdening of their Version with such a multitude of learned Latin terms as should cause it to forfeit its homely character, and shut up great portions of it from the understanding of plain and unlearned men. There is a remarkable confession to this effect, to the wisdom, in fact, which guided them from above, to the providence that overruled their work, an honorable acknowledgment of the immense superiority in this respect of our English Version over the Romish or Douay, made by one now unhappily familiar with the latter, as once he was with our own. One of those who has forsaken the communion of the English Church has exprest himself in deeply touching tones of lamentation over all, which in forsaking our translation, he feels himself to have foregone and lost. These are his words: "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 serious

DOUAY VERSION OF SCRIPTURE.

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ness.... 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."*

Such are his touching words; and certainly one has only to compare this version of ours with the Douay, and the far greater excellence of our own reveals itself at once. I am not speaking now in respect of superior accuracy of scholarship; nor yet of the absence of by-ends, of all turning and twisting the translation to support certain doctrines; nor yet do I allude to the fact that one translation is from the original Greek, the other only from the Latin, and thus the translation of a translation, often reproducing the mistakes of that translation; but, putting aside all considerations such as these, I would now speak only of the superiority of the diction in which the meaning, be it correct or incorrect, is conveyed to English readers. I open the Douay version at Gal. v. 19, where the long list of the "works of the flesh," and "fruit of the Spirit," is given. But what could a mere English reader make

* Dublin Review, June, 1853,

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of words such as these 'impudicity,' 'ebrieties,' comessations,' 'longanimity,' all which occur in that passage? while our Version has for 'impudicity' 'wantonness,' for ebrieties' 'drunkenness,' for 'comessations' 'revellings,' for 'longanimity' 'long-suffering.' Or set over against one another such phrases as these, in the Douay, 'the exemplars of the celestials' (Heb. ix. 23), but in ours, 'the patterns of things in the heavens.' Or suppose if, instead of the words which we read at Heb. xiii. 16, namely, "to do good and to communicate forget not; for with such sacrifices God is well pleased," we read as follows, which are the words. of the Douay, "Beneficence and communication do not forget; for with such hosts God is promerited"?-who does not feel how great and enduring our loss would have been, how it would have searched into the whole religious life of our people, if the translation used by them had been composed in such Latin-English as this?

There was indeed something still deeper than love of sound and genuine English at work in our translators, whether they were conscious of it, or no, which hindered them from sending the Scriptures to their fellow-countrymen dressed out in a semi-Latin garb. The Reformation, which they were in this translation so mightily strengthening and confirming, was just a throwing off, on the part of the Teutonic nations, of that everlasting pupilage in which Rome would have held them; an assertion at length that they were come to full age, and that not through her, but directly through Christ, they would address themselves unto

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God. The use of the Latin language as the language of worship, as the language in which the Scriptures might alone be read, had been the great badge of servitude, even as the Latin habits of thought and feeling which it promoted had been the great helps to the continuance of this servitude, through long ages. It lay deep then in the very nature of their cause that the Reformers should develop the Saxon, or essentially national, element in the language; while it was just as natural that the Douay translators, if they must translate the Scriptures into English at all, should yet translate them into such English as should bear the nearest possible resemblance to the Latin Vulgate, which Rome with a very deep wisdom of this world would gladly have seen as the only one in the hands of the faithful.

Let me again, however, recur to the fact that what our Reformers did in this matter they did without exaggeration; even as they had shown the same wise. moderation in higher matters. They gave to the Latin side of the language its rights, though they would not suffer it to encroach upon and usurp those of the Teutonic part of the language. It would be difficult not to believe, even if all outward signs said not the same thing, that there are great things in store for the one language of Europe which is thus the connecting link between the North and the South; between the languages spoken by the Teutonic nations of the North and by the Romance nations of the South;-which holds on to both, which partakes of both; which is as a middle term between both. It has been often thought

that the English Church, being in like manner doublefronted, looking on the one side toward Rome, being herself truly Catholic, looking on the other toward the Protestant communions, being herself also protesting and reformed, may yet have a great part in the Providence of God to play for the reconciling of a divided Christendom. And if this ever should be so, if, in spite of our sins and unworthiness, so blessed a task should be in store for us, it will not be a small help and assistance thereunto, that the language in which her mediation will have to be effected is one wherein both parties may claim their own, in which neither will feel that it is receiving the adjudication of a stranger, of one who must be an alien from its deeper thoughts and habits, because an alien from its words, but a language in which both recognize very much of that which is deepest and most precious of their own.

Nor is this merit which I have just claimed for our English the mere dream and fancy of patriotic vanity. The scholar who in our days is most profoundly acquainted with the great group of the Gothic languages in Europe, and a passionate lover, if ever there were such, of his native German, I mean Jacob Grimm, has expressed himself very nearly to the same effect, has given the palm over all to our English in words which you will not grudge to hear quoted, and with which I shall bring this lecture to a close. After ascribing to it "a veritable power of expression, such as perhaps never stood at the command of any other language of men," he goes on to say, "Its highly spiritual genius, and wonderfully happy development and condition,

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