Among the merits of an English boarding-school education 60-odd years ago was an unlikely one: compulsory churchgoing. Not for the Christianity it was supposed to teach, but because it meant contact, however enforced, with the two noblest sources of our language, the Church of England?s Bible of 1611 and its 1662 prayer book.
The religion often went in at one boyish ear and out the other. But words are harder to forget. Hear the same phrases often enough at that age and they are with you for life. For the educated few among our ancestors, these two books were the bedrock of written English.
To Britons, the 1611 Bible is the ?Authorized Version?; to Americans, the ?King James Bible?, after James I of England (and VI of Scotland, so the Scots share it too), who authorized its translation. But its truest father was an unacknowledged earlier translator, William Tyndale. An ardent Protestant, he translated the New Testament and parts of the Old some 90 years earlier. And was duly put to death for it, in what is now Belgium, in 1536. His work was adapted by the committee of scholars working for King James. And, for all its archaisms, what a legacy it has left us.
In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A still, small voice. Of making many books there is no end. Cast thy bread upon the waters. Consider the lilies of the field...they toil not neither do they spin. Blessed are the peacemakers. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar?s. Countless such phrases are lodged in my memory and that of most educated Englishmen up to about 1970. They are echoed often in literature. Any American president, when he wishes to speak solemnly, will go into biblical mode, from Lincoln?s four score and seven years ago to Kennedy?s ask not what your country can do for you.
The old prayer book was still more familiar, because parts of it were repeated every Sunday in every Anglican church for centuries. We have erred and strayed like lost sheep. Lighten our darkness, O Lord. Till death us do part, from the marriage service. And many more.
Familiar hymns left their mark as well: All things bright and beautiful, or the much-parodied God moves in a mysterious way, for example. The dreary Abide with me has been sung at football?s annual cup final since 1927, and when the Football Association in the 1970s decided its time was up, the fans, astonishingly, rebelled. If you had, as I have, sung seeking God?s aid ?for those in peril on the sea? at a time when your country?s very survival depended on its sailors, you would not forget that phrase.
For most Englishmen, save Catholics and Jews, this was part of their linguistic heritage until the 19th century, when churchgoing began to fall off; and much later, for the privately-educated upper classes. But no longer. New, simpler versions of the Bible have largely ousted that of 1611. The Church of England brought in an ?alternative service book? in 1980. Many clergymen were glad: imagine winning believers with the long-winded and archaic verbiage of the old books. But religion?s arguable gain has been language?s certain loss. There?s even a Prayer Book Society of elderly fogeys devoted to keeping that work alive, for reasons of language more than religion; and your wordcager shares their regrets.
Yet I have a niggling doubt. What about all those writers who didn?t have this linguistic background? Some no doubt acquired it at second hand. Yet there are many fine writers ?Shakespeare, eg ? who show little of its influence, if only because they wrote before 1611 (or indeed long after the Authorized Version took decades to become established, and the translation in common use until it did was not Tyndale?s). And there have been many since, not least recently, and in places where no Bible is a normal part of even an English-language education. Do readers of The Telegraph feel linguistically deprived? I?d be surprised to learn it.
