Article March 28, 1936 Issue

Signs of the Times

Topic: The Bible

with contributions from Odell Shepard, Orion C. Hopper, Jr., Bruce Brown, Raymond C. Knox, Zona Gale

[Editorial in the New York Times, New York]

The "first whole Bible printed in English," known as the "Coverdale Bible," was finished, according to its colophon, on October 4, 1535. This date is still cherished as the birthday of the Bible as an English book—the Book which, in its many translations and millions of copies, has had more influence in determining the character of Western civilization than any other book—than all other books. The historian Trevelyan, writing of the Bible in England, says more explicitly that the continued domestic study of the Book upon national character, imagination, and intelligence for nearly three centuries was greater than that of any literary movement in our annals or any religious movement since the coming of St. Augustine.

On our side of the English-speaking world, the great journalist Charles A. Dana said that of all books the most indispensable and the most useful, "the one whose knowledge is the most effective," is the Bible. He was considering it in this testimony not as a religious work but for its usefulness in his profession. He added: "There is perhaps no book whose style is more suggestive and more instructive, from which you learn more directly that sublime simplicity which never exaggerates, which recounts the greatest events with solemnity but without sentimentality or affectation, none which you open with such confidence and lay down with such reverence."

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