Article November 16, 1912 Issue

The reply of "Nemo" to my last letter is written in a tone...

Frederick Dixon—Weymouth, England.

Weymouth Telegram

The reply of "Nemo" to my last letter is written in a tone which makes it a pleasure to reply to him. There is, however, at the very beginning of his letter a passage which puzzles me. He quotes from my last letter a sentence, not one word of which, if he will forgive me for saying so, appears in it. It is not even a paraphrase of what I wrote. I never said that he had modesty enough not to say he had found Science and Health easy to understand. I simply said, in so many words, that what was easy to one person was difficult to another, and vice versa, and this he himself admirably illustrates in the three books he names.

To the student of constitutional history, Hallam's book is particularly interesting and valuable, if only on account of what Macaulay once termed his "icy impartiality;" Motley's "United Netherlands" would, I should have imagined, have proved to most people an extraordinarily interesting book; but with regard to Thiers, the question is somewhat different. It is only fair to judge it in the French original, certainly not in any translation anybody chooses to have made of it. This, as a matter of fact, is the exact point I made in my letter on the subject of the fourth gospel. I was alluding specifically to the Greek text, and if the critic will refer to what Renan wrote on the subject, he will understand exactly what I mean. The authorized version which he quotes, is the result of a process of evolution, beginning with Wyclif, and passing through Tyndal and Coverdale to the King James version. More than eighty per cent of it, to be exact, is Tyndal. Possibly the Greek text is itself a translation of an Aramaic original. No man knows, but the haunting rhythm which the critic quotes is most emphatically Tyndal and not the apostle. It is precisely because generations of translators have sacrificed the scientific phraseology of the Greek to the rhythm of their own versions, that the exact scholars of our own time are being forced to make this clear.

Take the very first example given by your correspondent. The famous fourteenth verse of the first chapter, commencing, "And the Word was made flesh." The rhythm of the authorized version may be perfect, but the construction of the passage has been described by a famous scholar as "irregular, consisting of a main clause broken by a parenthesis, which records the observation of the fact." The mysticism of the original (I use the word in its historical sense) has given rise to centuries of controversy of the most envenomed description, which a scientific understanding of the text, though it would incidentally have involved a disregard of rhythm, would have avoided. The failure to get the science of the fourth gospel clear has mean the Arian controversy, the futile arguments of the Homoousians and the Homoiousians, and long centuries of persecution, blazing up in the fires of Smithfield and the auto da fé of Lima and Valparaiso.

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