Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from A Short History of the English People, Vol. 2
Had an audible voice to read to them. One John Porter used sometimes to be occupied in that goodly exer cise, to the edifying of himself as well as others. -this Porter was a fresh young man and of a big stature; and great multitudes would resort thither to hear him, because he could read well and had an audible voice. But the goodly exercise of readers such as Porter was soon super seded by the continued recitation of both Old Testament and New in the public services of the Church; while the small Geneva Bibles carried the Scripture into every home. The popularity of the Bible was owing to other causes besides that of religion. The whole prose literature of Eng land, save the forgotten tracts oi Wyclif, has grown'up since the translation of the Scriptures by Tyndale and Coverdale. So far as the-nation at large was concerned, no history, no romance, hardly any poetry, save the little known verse of Chaucer, existed in the English tongue when the Bible was ordered to be set up in churches. Sun day after Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered round Bonner's Bibles in the nave of St. Paul's, or the family group that hung on the words of the Geneva Bible in the devotional exercises at home, were leavened with a new literature. Legend and annal, war-song and psalm, State roll and biography, the mighty voices of prophets, the par ables of Evangelists, stories of mission journeys, of perils by the sea and among the heathen, philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, all were ?ung broadcast over minds un occupied for the most part by any rival learning. The dis closure of the stores of Greek literature had wrought the revolution of the Renascence. The disclosure of the older mass of Hebrew literature wrought the revolution of the Reformation. But the one revolution was far deeper and Wider in its effects than the other. No version could trans fer to another tongue the peculiar charm of language which gave their value to the authors of Greece and Rome. Clas sical letters, therefore, remained in the possession of the learned, that is, of the few; and among these, with the exception of Oolet and More, or of the pedants who revived a Pagan worship in the gardens of the Florentine Academy, their direct in?uence was purely intellectual. But the tongue of the Hebrew, the idiom of the Hellenistic Greek.
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