88 THE KEV. T. H. DARLOW, M.A., ON THE CHARACTER 



was meant to be translated ; and God's purpose is fulfilled as the 

 Bible speaks to every man in his own tongue in which he was 

 born. 



The command to go into all the world and to preach the 

 Gospel to every creature applies to the Bible as well as to the 

 Church ; and to fulfil its mission God's Book must needs 

 become all things to all men. The translation of the Scriptures 

 began in the earliest ages of the Church, and moves along the 

 central tide of Christian history. This work did not wait for 

 the formal decree of any Council ; it proceeded from the deep, 

 spontaneous Christian instinct that every man must learn the 

 Gospel in his own tongue. Pearly in the second century, from 

 the Church at Antioch where the disciples were first called 

 Christians, came the original impulse to turn the Scriptures 

 into Syriac, which was then the common speech of the regions 

 lying east of Antioch towards the Euphrates valley. About the 

 end of the third century, though in the Church at Alexandria 

 men spoke Greek, the first Coptic version arose, made for the 

 native Egyptians. In the fourth century, from the Church at 

 Constantinople proceeded the early Gothic version, for the 

 barbarous invaders of the Eastern Empire. From the Council 

 of Ephesus a band of young Armenians carried back to their 

 native land certain manuscripts, by whose aid the Armenian 

 version was formed at the end of the fifth century, after 

 Miesrob had for tliat purpose constituted the earliest Armenian 

 alphabet. Similarly, in the nintli century, Cyril and Methodius 

 invented what has since become the liussian alphabet and 

 translated the Scriptures into Slavonic — the beginning of books 

 and of letters for the great Slavonic race. The Frankish and 

 Teutonic conquerors of the Western Empire accepted Latin 

 as the common tongue which every educated man could 

 read and speak ; so Jerome's Latin Bible became for them not a 

 sealed book, but literally their Yulgate, or common version, and 

 remained the Bible of Western Christendom for a thousand 

 years. When printing began in the middle of the fifteenth 

 century, it was natural and fitting that the first complete book 

 to issue from Gutenberg's press at Mainz should be the Latin 

 Bible. More than 100 editions of the Yulgate were printed 

 before that century ended, and other versions speedily followed 

 in the principal vernaculars of Europe. In Italy, for instance, 

 the Italian Bible was printed a dozen tunes before the year 

 A.D. 1500 ; and in Germany eighteen folio editions of the 

 German Bible had already appeared when Luther published his 

 New Testament. 



