BIBLE 



704 



BIBLE 



synagogue and stood up for to read." At 

 that time there existed only the Old Testa- 

 ment, but as the founders of the Christian 

 Church wrote out their records of its origin 

 or sent to individual churches their, advice in 

 letters, these, too, became a part of the Holy 

 Scriptures. 



As Christianity spread to Europe the influ- 

 ence of the sacred writings spread also. In- 

 terest in secular learning died out in the 

 troubled times of the later Roman Empire 

 and in the Dark Ages which followed, but 

 love for "the book" never flagged, and it 

 seems not too much to say that knowledge 

 of the arts of reading and writing might have 

 died out had it not been for this concern for 

 the sacred writings. There were no printing 

 presses in those days, and every new copy of 

 the Scriptures which was made had to be 

 laboriously written out by hand. Each monas- 

 tery had its writing room, in which the monks 

 toiled over their precious manuscripts, keep- 

 ing heart and hand and pen clean, that they 

 might be worthy of the high task. In his 

 Golden Legend Longfellow put into the mouth 

 of a monk the words 



It is growing dark ! Yet one line more, 

 And then my work for to-day is o'er. 

 I come again to the name of the Lord ! 

 Ere I that awful name record, 

 That is spoken so lightly among men, 

 Let me pause awhile, and wash my pen ; 

 Pure from blemish and blot must it be 

 When it writes that word of mystery. 



Very beautiful were some of these manu- 

 scripts, for they were frequently embellished 

 or illuminated with gold and silver and glow- 

 ing colors. Longfellow's monk continues: 



There, now, is an initial letter ! 

 Saint Uric himself never made a better ! 

 Finished down to the leaf and the snail, 

 Down to the eyes on the peacock's tail ! 



So the .Bible was kept alive by the monks' 

 labor of love, until in the fifteenth century 

 there came that wonderful invention which 

 revolutionized learning the invention of 

 printing from movable types. So far as is 

 known the first book printed by Gutenberg 

 (which see) was a Bible; and from that time 

 on the number of Bibles turned out by the 

 presses has steadily increased. In many in- 

 stances it has been necessary to design and 

 make special types for the printing of the 

 Bible in languages which had never before 

 known a printed book, but no difficulty has 

 been so great as to daunt those who have de- 

 termined to make it possible for everyone, 



everywhere, to read the Bible in his own 

 language. 



From One Language to Many. In a sense, 

 the writings of any great author make up a 

 library, but the Bible differs from such a col- 

 lection in that it is the work of about forty 

 authors. All of its books, with the exception 

 of Daniel and Ezra, which were in Aramaic, 

 were written in Hebrew or in Greek; but the 



SPECIMEN OF EARLIEST MANUSCRIPT 

 A portion of Exodus (chapter XXVI, verse 7). 

 written in square Hebrew. This was translated 

 into Syriac, Greek, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Old 

 English, and finally into present-day English. 



Hebrew books, those which comprised the 

 Scriptures in the time of Christ, had all been 

 translated into Aramaic, for Hebrew had at 

 that time become a dead language. Further 

 translations, too, were necessary, for many of 

 the Jews had settled in different countries 

 and had adopted the languages of the native 

 inhabitants. 



Of these ancient translations into other 

 tongues by far the most valuable was that 

 known as the Septuagint, which was completed 

 in 285 B. c. It is a translation from Hebrew 

 into Greek of such parts of the Scriptures as 

 then existed, and received its name, which 

 means seventy, from the fact that about that 

 many scholars took part in the work of trans- 

 lating. 



The time came, however, when Christianity 

 became the religion of the Roman world, and 

 Latin-speaking Christians demanded the Bible 

 in their own tongue. Jerome, one of the most 

 famous of the Church fathers, completed such 

 a translation in A. D. 405, and this Vulgate, as 

 it was called, became the authorized Bible of 

 the Western Church. Down to the present 

 time the Bible in use in the Roman Catholic 

 Church is based on the Vulgate. 



In Modern Tongues. Long after Christian- 

 ity spread to countries where no Latin was 





