Pulitzer Prize winner Barbara Tuchman writes about the-great-used-to-be-in England and, although I took a course in college called, "The History of England," our professor, Dr. Jacqueline Collins, never told us any of the following.
The year is 1538 and Henry VIII is on the throne. He issues a proclamation: "One book of the whole Bible is to placed in every church in England." He orders the clergy to "place the Bible in some prominent spot where your parishioners may most commonly resort to the same, and read it. You shall deprive no man from reading or hearing it but you shall expressly stir, provoke encourage, and exhort every person to read the same."
His reason for the decree was that the Bible had been translated into English and was accepted as the highest authority for an autonomous English church. Starting with this decree, the history, traditions, and moral law of the Hebrew nation became part of the English culture. For the next 300 years, the Bible was the most powerful influence on the English culture.
Matthew Arnold said: "The Bible linked the genius and history of us English to the genius and history of the Hebrew people." Wherever the Reformation took hold, the Bible replaced the pope as the final spiritual authority. Wherever the papal bull had ruled, the Word of God as revealed in the Hebrew revelation--Abraham, Moses, Isiah, Elijah, Daniel, down to Jesus and Paul now governed.
Thomas Huxley wrote: "Consider the great historical fact that this book, the Bible, has been woven into the life of all that 's best and noblest in English history, that it has become the national epic of Britain."
After the publication of the King James Bible in 1611, the adoption of the Bible was complete. Writers habitually used phrases like, "the national Bible" and called it "the greatest of English classics." Another called it, the most venerable of the national heirlooms."
Tuchman also said, "No other book penetrated so deeply the bone and spirit of English life."
When Sir Walter Scott, author of Ivanhoe, lay dying, he asked Lockhart to read to him. Lockhart asked, What book?" Scott replied, "There is but one." (The Bible) So deeply had the Bible embedded itself in the British DNA that the King James Version influenced both the literature and the speech of England. It was THE book of English culture, causing one author to say that England had a "mania" for the Old Testament.
It was England that produced Wycliffe and Tyndale, men who learned the Greek and Hebrew languages to get the Bible into the hands of the "vulgar," the common man, even to the plow boys of the realm
What endeared the Bible to the British was its monotheism and its presentation of an orderly society based on the rules of social behavior between man and man and man and God.
Everyone came to know the Bible and everyone honored it. "It was in many a home, in fact, it was the only book in most. It was read over and over until its words and images were as familiar as bread." (Tuchman) British children learned long chapters by heart and knew the geography of Palestine better than their own.
John Ruskin, in his autobiography, wrote on page 1 that at the bidding of his mother he had to read the entire Bible through, every syllable, every hard name, and all aloud from Genesis to Revelation, once a year and then begin again at Genesis 1:1 the next day. Lord Balfour, of the Balfour Declaration was trained in the Old Testament by his mother.*
So it was in the -great- used- to- be that God used a people from a tiny island to continue the transmission of the message of the Bible, generation after generation after generation.
One could only wish for a professor who teach the history of England from that perspective. Professor Collins did not.
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*The Balfour Declaration was a public statement issued by
the British Government in 1917 announcing its support for the
establishment of a "national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.
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