Psalm v. 3. My Voice shalt thou hear in the Morning, O Lord; in the
  Morning will I direct Prayer unto thee, and will look up.

  Matthew xiii. 1. The same Day went Jesus out of the House, and sat
  by the Sea-side.

  Matthew xxvii. 32. And as they came out, they found a Man of
  Cyrene, Simon by Name:  Him they compelled to bear his Cross.

  John ii. 11. This Beginning of Miracles did Jesus in Cana of
  Galilee.

John xii. 16. These things understood not his Disciples at the
first.

John viii. 44. Ye are of your Father the Devil, and the Lusts of
your Father will ye do.

“Verbo sensum cludere, multo, si compositio patiatur, optimum est. 
In Verbis enim Sermonis vis inest.”
Quintil.

By these Passages, and innumerable others that might be produc’d, it appears that the English Bible is translated in such a manner as I have mentioned above:  And as we see many Places in the Paradise Lost, which are exactly taken from this Translation, Why may we not conclude Milton acquir’d much of his Stile from this Book?  I can give an Instance of another very learned Person, who certainly learnt his way of Writing from it.  I mean the late Dr. Clarke.  Nothing can be more clear than his Stile, and yet nothing can be more like the Greek or Latin, agreeably to the English Bible.  I beg leave to produce one Instance from his Exposition of the Church Catechism.

  “Next after the Creed are in natural Order plac’d the Ten
  Commandments.

Is there any thing in Demosthenes or Tully more inverted than this Passage?  And yet the meanest Persons understand it, and are not at all shock’d at it; and this cannot possibly, with respect to them, proceed from any thing else, but their having been from their Childhood accustomed to this Language in the Bible, and their still continuing frequently to hear it in the publick Offices of the Church, and elsewhere:  From whence I am apt to think Mr. Pope’s Opinion is not to be subscrib’d to, when he says,

  “And what now Chaucer is, shall Dryden be.”

It did not occur to that ingenious Writer, that the State of the English Language is very different at this time from what it was in Chaucer’s Days:  It was then in its Infancy:  And even the publick Worship of God was in a foreign Tongue, a thing as fatal to the Language of any Country, as to Religion itself.  But now we have all that Service in the vernacular Tongue; and besides that, the Bible in English, which may be properly called the Standard of our Language:  For this Book contains a Variety of every kind of Stile, the Poetick, the Historick, the Narrative, and all framed after the manner