and 1686. In this last, e.g., we read in Acts xiii, 2: comme ils offroient au Seigneur le Sacrifice de la Messe."*

"Or

Moreover, from the nature of the case, the first attempt to render the Scriptures into a fresh language must always be tentative and imperfect. No Bible translation emerges from the translator's brain, as Athenè was fabled to have sprung, full-panoplied, from the head of Zeus. The Bible learns to utter God's thoughts in a new tongue as a child learns to talk. First in broken words, which gradually gain shape and distinctness; then in sentences, which, though disjointed at first, grow more and more closely connected, till ultimately the child's words become a more or less complete vehicle of his ideas. Behind the finished Book lie its earlier sections, the New Testament or the Psalter or one or two Gospels; behind these, again, lie the first attempts at the Lord's Prayer and a few scattered texts. Arduous preliminary labour is often necessary. About 200 languages have been reduced to written form and provided for the first time with an alphabet and a grammar, simply that they might become channels for the Gospel.

Such was the life-history of the Bible prepared in New England by the earliest Protestant missionary, John Eliot, one of the Pilgrim Fathers. He began to study the language of the Massachusetts Indians, about the year 1643, with the help of an Indian who had been captured in war. Soon the infant Massachusetts Bible began to learn its new lesson, and growing day by day, it stood forth twenty years later in complete manhood. At the end of his Indian Grammar, Eliot lifts the veil from its history and tells us a little of what it cost. He writes: "I have now finished what I shall do at present: And in a word or two to satisfie the prudent Enquirer how I found out these new wayes of Grammar, which no other Learned Language (so far as I know) useth; I thus inform him: God first put into my heart a compassion over their poor Souls, and a desire to teach them to know Christ, and to bring them into his Kingdome. Then presently I found out (by Gods wise providence) a pregnant witted young man, who had been a Servant in an English house, who pretty well understood our Language, better than he could speak it, and well understood his own Language, and hath a clear pronunciation: Him I made my interpreter. By his help I translated the Commandments, the Lord's Prayer, and

It must in justice be added that these Testaments were afterwards repudiated by the ecclesiastical authorities.

many Texts of Scripture: also I compiled both Exhortations and Prayers by his help. I diligently marked the difference of their Grammar from ours: When I found the way of them, I would pursue a word, a Noun, a Verb, through all variations I could think of. And thus I came at it. We must not sit still, and look for Miracles: Up, and be doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and Pains, through Faith in Jesus Christ, will do any thing."

John Eliot's experience has been reproduced in the lives of multitudes of scholars, whose prayers and pains, joined with their faith, have moved away mountains of difficulty and opened out a way for the voice of God to hearts hitherto unconscious of His tones. Let us pay homage to the heroic drudgery of the noble army of translators who have toiled with endless patience to give men God's message in their mother tongue.

All great books must in some degree suffer when they are made to speak in what is not their native language. Even the best translation can be no better than the copy of a picture or the cast of a statue. When we take, for example, the masterpieces of human literature-the Iliad or the Divina Commedia, or Paradise Lost, or Faust, or Macbeth-and compare them with their finest versions in a foreign tongue, we begin to realize how much has been lost. The translation of an original poem is like the wrong side of a piece of tapestry-the sharp outlines vanish, the clear, bright colours are blurred. For a poet's thought and language must needs be so fused together that it is half fatal to divorce his ideas from his diction. Indeed, the most perfect pieces of literature are the least capable of adequate translation.

The Bible, however, comes to us, not as perfect literature, but as essentially the medium and vehicle of God's revelation. And the Bible has this unique quality that it may be translated into all the languages of mankind without sensibly losing its majesty and tenderness and spiritual power. The Scriptures as a whole can be rendered with but little sacrifice of their energy and their beauty. Into whatever barbarous tongue you translate the New Testament, it seems to fit that tongue as though it had been made for it: it was made for it! In every version the Book retains its power to pierce the thoughts of the heart; it still remains sharper than a two-edged sword; it still divides joint and marrow. It does its supreme work-compared with which nothing else matters.

In his recent volume on The Bible, Professor Peake points out that "we may reverently and thankfully recognize that even the

choice of the languages of revelation was not left uncared for by the providence of God." It is no small thing that Hebrew, the mother-tongue of Israel-unlike Chinese or Accadian-was a language with an alphabet. Moreover, the Hebrew language by virtue of its simplicity and directness is unusually easy to translate. Bishop Oluwole, speaking of his own West African tongue, has said: "Yoruba is a language into which the Bible phraseology goes easily. We find it very convenient to translate direct from Hebrew, more so than from English." On the other hand, we may recall Luther's exclamation: "Good God, how hard it is to make these Hebrew prophets speak German."

Again, it is not without significance that the Apostles and Evangelists wrote in Greek, which came nearest to a universal language in the ancient world. Moreover, they did not write in classical Greek. Of recent discoveries about the Bible none is more striking than the testimony as to the language of the New Testament which has been unearthed during the last few years. out of rubbish heaps of waste paper and broken pottery buried in the sands of Egypt and dating back to the very beginning of the Christian era. What this new linguistic evidence demonstrates may be stated in the words of the distinguished scholar who has done so much to make it available in English: "The conclusion is that Biblical' Greek was simply the vernacular of daily life. The Holy Ghost spoke absolutely in the language of the people, as we might surely have expected He would." That is to say, the New Testament was composed in the common homely speech of those who first read its pages; it was written literally in the vulgar tongue.

The astonishing translatableness of Scripture has been explained on various grounds. Some point to the character of, its metaphors, the frequent parallelism of its construction, the homely force of its images from common objects. Others emphasize the sublime and pathetic ideas which mingle with its contents. But the real secret lies in the subject-matter of the Bible itself.

With the true classics of the world there is no respect of persons; they are concerned with those things which are common, with matters of enduring and universal interest which come home to everyone alike. Now we have one Book, and only one, which embraces all the heights and depths of human The Bible belongs to those elemental things-like the sky and the wind and the sea, like bread and wine, like the kisses of little children and tears shed beside the grave-which

can never grow stale or obsolete or out of date, because they are the common heritage of mankind. This Book goes down to the root of our bitterest needs, our darkest sorrows. It speaks with accents that are not of this world about the only things which really matter at last to each human creature. Now the things common to all men are far more important than the things peculiar to some men. And the Bible can speak in every language and come home to every race, because it is as catholic as the blood in men's veins and the milk in women's breasts.

This is not the place to dwell upon the immense and inherent difficulties of rendering the Scriptures into the poverty-stricken speech of a barbarous people. In the language of New Britain, for instance, no verb could be found meaning to "forgive." In the Ibo language, current among three millions of tribesmen in Southern Nigeria, Archdeacon Dennis tells us that the same word has to do for "right" and "might," that "servant" and "slave" are synonymous, that "friendship" and "fornication" are scarcely distinguishable, and that "conscience" has to be transliterated. Such examples might be multiplied to almost any extent. They remind us that after all the crucial difficulty in translating the Bible is ethical rather than linguistic. Sir George Grierson, who is the first living authority on Indian languages, has described a tribe in Eastern India whose only idea of a feast was to get intoxicated on their native beer, and whose only word for festival meant literally "much beer drinking." In rendering into their speech the parable of the Prodigal Son, he was put to great perplexity, merely because he could find no word to express the rejoicing on the Prodigal's return, which did not also suggest the idea of intoxication. The fact is that not only the heathen, but the speech of the heathen, must be converted. Their very language needs to be born anew. Their words and phrases must be redeemed from foul uses and baptized into a Christian sense in order to be able to convey the ideas of the Gospel.

Last

Nevertheless experience proves in a wonderful way how even crude and imperfect and tentative versions of Scripture can accomplish spiritual results which bear witness to a power which is not of this world. Take one of the most recent cases. year the Rev. Copland King, of the Anglican New Guinea Mission, wrote to me describing how he had rendered St. Luke into Binandere for a tribe in Papua. By that tribe the seat of emotion is considered to be the throat, not the heart. Hence "bad throat" means sorrow, a "throaty" man is a wise man, and to "take the throat" means to love. In St. Luke vii, 45,

“Thou gavest me no kiss" had to be translated "Thou didst not smell my nose." No word could be found meaning " forgive," which had to be translated by "forget" or "do not punish." Well, only a dozen years ago, the readers of this Gospel were using stone weapons and practising cannibalism. But last Christmas twelvemonth the Holy Communion was celebrated in the Binandere language for the first time.

Surely the spiritual potency of its versions in all languages and among all races, sets the New Testament immeasurably above every other book in the world. What is there to substitute A dramatic preacher once pictured a missionary landing on some savage island in the Pacific, and addressing the cannibals who gathered round him in words like these: "Wipe your blood-stained lips, and listen while I read you this passage, which I have translated into your own tongue, from The Light of Asia."

The final evidence for the supernatural quality of the Bible lies in the moral and spiritual power with which it is speaking to-day in all the tongues of the world. God's living voice uttered in the Scriptures still comes home to men's consciences, and authenticates itself in their deepest experiences. On the title-page of an Italian pocket Testament printed at Lyons in 1551 we read: Il Nuovo ed Eterno Testamento di Giesu ChristoThe New and Eternal Testament of Jesus Christ. This Book can never be called old, except in the sense in which time is old, while morning is always new. Its message is as mighty as ever to quicken human hearts and regenerate human characters; it moves among the nations with the power of an endless Life.

DISCUSSION.

The CHAIRMAN said there were two great mysteries-Babel and Bible. What was the nature of the confusion which took place at Babel? Was it that men lost their memories, or was there a disturbance of their tongues or of their thinking powers? There were about 2,000 languages now current in the world; how did they come into existence? In the New Hebrides, a dozen different languages sometimes existed in the same island. Probably the transliteration of the Bible began before any translation; a change of character probably took place in the time of Moses. In the book of Genesis, we found two ways of expressing the same thing; thus Laban and Jacob gave different things to their stone of

H