n even Shakespeare upon the written and spoken
language of the English race. For this reason, to study English literature
without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that
literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete. It
is not necessary to consider the work from a religious point of view at
all; indeed, to so consider it would be rather a hindrance to the
understanding of its literary excellence. Some persons have ventured to
say that it is only since Englishmen ceased to believe in the Bible that
they began to discover how beautiful it was. This is not altogether true;
but it is partly true. For it is one thing to consider every word of a
book as the word of God or gods, and another thing to consider it simply
as the work of men like ourselves. Naturally we should think it our duty
to suppose the work of a divine being perfect in itself, and to imagine
beauty and truth where neither really exists. The wonder of the English
Bible can really be best appreciated by those who, knowing it to be the
work of men much less educated and cultivated than the scholars of the
nineteenth century, nevertheless perceive that those men were able to do
in literature what no man of our own day could possibly do.

Of course in considering the work of the translators, we must remember the
magnificence of the original. I should not like to say that the Bible is
the greatest of all religious books. From the moral point of view it
contains very much that we can not to-day approve of; and what is good in
it can be found in the sacred books of other nations. Its ethics can not
even claim to be absolutely original. The ancient Egyptian scriptures
contain beauties almost superior in moral exaltation to anything contained
in the Old Testament; and the sacred books of other Eastern nations,
notably the sacred books of India, surpass the Hebrew scriptures in the
highest qualities of imagination and of profound thought. It is only of
late years that Europe, through the labour of Sanskrit and Pali scholars,
has become acquainted with the astonishing beauty of thought and feeling
which Indian scholars enshrined in scriptures much more voluminous than
the Hebrew Bible; and it is not impossible that this far-off literature
will some day influence European thought quite as much as the Jewish
Bible. Everywhere to-day in Europe and America the study of Buddhist and
Sanskrit literature is being pursued not only with