The voice of Holy Scripture is the spring and measure of individual faith. |
THERE is a famous saying, which dates from the times of persecution, that 'the blood of Martyrs is the seed of the 'Church.' It may be added in the like spirit that the voice of Holy Scripture is the spring and measure of individual faith. Both statements require to be modified in their application; but it remains generally true that the society which is founded by human devotion and labour, is quickened in its several members by the influence of the Word. So it is that the history of the vernacular Scriptures is in a great measure the history of personal faith. A people which is without a Bible in its mother tongue, or is restrained from using it, or wilfully neglects it, is also imperfect, or degenerate, or lifeless in its apprehension of Christian Truth, and proportionately bereft of the strength which flows from a living Creed.
In the first ages of the Church the translation of the Scriptures followed immediately on the introduction of Christianity to a nation of a new language. When the Gospel spread eastwards, a Syriac translation of the New Testament was one of the first monuments of its power. When it spread westwards, a Latin version preceded, as far as we know, all other literary efforts of the African Church. Ulfilas, the second bishop of the Goths, gave them the Scriptures in their own language. Miesrob, the framer of the Armenian alphabet, was the translator of the Armenian Bible; and the Slavonic version was due in part at least to the two brothers, Cyrillus and Methodius, who first reduced the Slavonic dialect to writing. The history of the Ethiopic and Egyptian Scriptures is probably similar, though it is more obscure; and it is most significant, that of these ancient versions, the greater part survive substantially the same in the public services of the nations which occupy the places of those for whom they were originally composed.
A general view of the history of the English Bible
By Brooke Foss Westcott
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