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2.

how profound its inspiration, which remains intact amid the changes
of time, which has survived neglect and suppression, which has survived
generations of controversy, which has survived even that more
dangerous thing, idolatry.

It is a commonplace, ladies and gentlemen, to say that the
truths of religion and philosophy must be translated into the language
and idiom of each age and country. We in Britain are fortunate in
having a translation of the Bible which is so exquisitely adapted to
our national genius that no lapse of years, no change of circumstance,
can put it out of date. I fancy a hundred copies of the Authorised
version are sold by you for every one of the Revised Version. That is
not a criticism of the merits of the new version so much as a tribute
to the presented merits of the old. In seven years forty-seven English
scholars accomplished a miracle. Before Tynadal the time when their
great predecessor Tyndal translated the New Testament, the Bible,
as Lord Asquith once said, was for our people only "a collection of
oracles in a dead language". After 1611 it became the national Gospel,
so much so when we want to say that a book has a universal appeal we
say that it is a bible.

Those forty-seven translators in 1611 were not men
of conspicuous eminence. Only one, Bishop Lancelot Andrewes, is
a familiar name; among the others I recognise Sir Henry Savile, but
that is only because he was connected with my old Oxford College.
Those forty-seven lived and wrought at a great moment in the history
of our literature and our language and our national life. They
were contemporaries of Shakespeare and Raleigh and Bacan and they
caught the magnificant and the ardour of the age. They were inspired