Its
felicities often seem to be things rather than mere words. It is part of
the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. Nay, it is
worshiped with a positive idolatry, in extenuation of whose gross
fanaticism its intrinsic beauty pleads availingly with the man of
letters and the scholar. The memory of the dead passes into it The
potent traditions of childhood are
STEREOTYPED IN ITS PHRASES.
The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath the
words. It is the representative of his best moments; and all that there
has been about him of soft, and gentle, and pure, and penitent, and
good, speaks to him forever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred
thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and controversy never soiled. It
has been to him all along as the silent, but oh! how intelligible voice
of his guardian angel; and in the length and breadth of the land there
is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him whose
spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible."
WHAT A PANEGYRIC
from an avowed opponent of this translation! And to whom are we
principally indebted for this lovely poem of God? To William Tyndale.
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