Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“ Suppose, whenever we use a term of affection, it is like one of the great love songs. If we fancy some such condition, we may begin to imagine what really happens when a language is in its perfection. ”

“ But in the history of English literature they are nobodies; only they are immortal nobodies. It is impossible to point to a single great man who is responsible for this masterpiece of verbal music. At the very time when the translation was being made there were in England greater literary men than she is ever likely to see again. But by no conceivable trick or turn of circumstance can Bacon or Burton, Jonson or Shakespeare, have had anything to do with the translation of the Bible. ”

“ The phrase `verbal inspiration' may be orthodox or unorthodox about the Bible in its supernatural sense. But it is very nearly true about the English translation in a secondary and merely human sense. The dull parts of the narrative are not dull; the trivial details are not trivial, because they are all lifted up on this last great wave of the poetical English language. Everyone, revolutionist and reactionary, is in our time saying that domestic things must be dull, that common things must be commonplace. Everyone is saying, though with much less literary brevity, `Surely the people is grass'. ”