else, has shown us conclusively that man is not a god who can make something out of nothing, and that every great work of genius must depend even less upon the man of genius himself than upon the labours of those who lived before him.  Every great author must draw his thoughts and his knowledge in part from other great authors, and these again from previous authors, and so on back, till we come to that far time in which there was no written literature, but only verses learned by heart and memorized by all the people of some one tribe or place, and taught by them to their children and to their grandchildren.  It is only in Greek mythology that the divinity of Wisdom leaps out of a god’s head, in full armour.  In the world of reality the more beautiful a work of art, the longer, we may be sure, was the time required to make it, and the greater the number of different minds which assisted in its development.

So with the English Bible.  No one man could have made the translation of 1611.  No one generation of men could have done it.  It was not the labour of a single century.  It represented the work of hundreds of translators working through hundreds of years, each succeeding generation improving a little upon the work of the previous generation, until in the seventeenth century the best had been done of which the English brain and the English language was capable.  In no other way can the surprising beauties of style and expression be explained.  No subsequent effort could improve the Bible of King James.  Every attempt made since the seventeenth century has only resulted in spoiling and deforming the strength and the beauty of the authorized text.

Now you will understand why, from the purely literary point of view, the English Bible is of the utmost importance for study.  Suppose we glance for a moment at the principal events in the history of this evolution.

The first translation of the Bible into a Western tongue was that made by Jerome (commonly called Saint Jerome) in the fourth century; he translated directly from the Hebrew and other Arabic languages into Latin, then the language of the Empire.  This translation into Latin was called the Vulgate,—­from vulgare, “to make generally known.”  The Vulgate is still used in the Roman church.  The first English translations which have been preserved to us were made from the Vulgate, not from the original tongues.  First of all, John Wycliffe’s Bible may be called the foundation of the seventeenth century Bible.  Wycliffe’s translation, in which he was helped by many others, was published between 1380 and 1388.  So we may say that the foundation of the English Bible dates from the fourteenth century, one thousand years after Jerome’s Latin translation.  But Wycliffe’s version, excellent as it was, could not serve very long:  the English language was changing too quickly.  Accordingly, in the time of Henry VIII Tyndale and Coverdale, with many others, made a new translation, this time not