glish Bible is a product of literary evolution.

In studying English criticisms upon different authors, I think that you
must have sometimes felt impatient with the critics who told you, for
example, that Tennyson was partly inspired by Wordsworth and partly by
Keats and partly by Coleridge; and that Coleridge was partly inspired by
Blake and Blake by the Elizabethans, and so on. You may have been tempted
to say, as I used very often myself to say, "What does it matter where the
man got his ideas from? I care only for the beauty that is in his work,
not for a history of his literary education." But to-day the value of the
study of such relations appears in quite a new light. Evolutional
philosophy, applied to the study of literature as to everything 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 t