Article March 19, 1921 Issue

Signs of the Times

with contributions from Frederick Dixon, Perceval Frutiger, Foster Watson, Alfred Noyes, Sydney Olivier

["The English Bible from Bede to Tyndale," by Frederick Dixon—Reprinted by request, from The Christian Science Monitor, Boston, U.S.A., Nov. 24, 1909]

England, in a famous sentence, has been termed the country of a book, and, allowing for the perhaps inevitable looseness of an epigram, the phrase is as descriptive as it is picturesque. English prose, with all its melody, its thunder, and its rhythm, found its earliest expression in the English Bible and it found it in the Bible because it found there the inspiration of all that was most enduring and noblest in the national character. "To the Bible," wrote Matthew Arnold, "men will return; and why? Because they cannot do without it; because happiness is our being, end, and aim, and happiness belongs to righteousness, and righteousness is revealed in the Bible." The Bible, as we have it, is not, of course, the work of an individual or a generation. It is rather like an English oak, bursting from its tiny acorn, and adding, century by century, to its girth, its majesty, and its might.

The acorn was the rude Anglo-Saxon verse into which Cædmon wrought the story of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures, as preserved in the Vulgate of Jerome. For the English Bible, like English history, had its genesis in the songs of the people. Cædmon was a herd employed in the great Abbey which the Lady Hild had built on the edge of the wild moor where the dark cliffs plunge down into the northern sea at Whitby. So deficient was he in sense of song that when the harp was passed to him at the monastic board, he would rise and go out to tend his cattle in the stables. One night, after he had done this, a voice spoke to him as he slept, saying, "Sing, Cædmon, some song to me," and he answered, "I cannot sing; for this cause left I the feast." Then said the voice, "You shall sing to me." Once more Cædmon answered, 'What shall I sing?" And the voice said, "The beginning of created things.' After that Cædmon did sing. He sang of the creation and all the history of Israel; he sang of the birth of Jesus, and of the resurrection and ascension. What he sang may be read to-day in the West Saxon version which has come down to us. It is not yet the English Bible, but it is the introduction.

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