God's Secretaries_The Making of the King James Bible by Adam Nicolson

Author:Adam Nicolson [Nicolson, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Religion
ISBN: 9780061804021
Amazon: B000FC11ZG
Goodreads: 7798527
Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
Published: 2001-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

For these Puritans, and in a way we can scarcely understand now, the words of the scriptures were thought to provide a direct, almost intravenous access to the divine.

Listen, for example, to an account given by a friend of the Translators, William Hinde, fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford, of the last words and dying moments of his friend, another minister, John Bruen of Bruen Stapleford in Cheshire, whose life Hinde wrote. Bruen embodied the milieu from which this translation emerged. He was both the minister of his local church and squire of his local village, and every Sunday he used to walk through the fields the mile or so from his manor house to divine service, ‘leaving neither butler nor cooke behind him’, singing psalms as they went along the broad, fair path between the hedgerows, gathering his tenants and neighbours around him, ‘as a leader of the Lord’s host’, preaching to them when he got there, and then afterwards leading them all back—more psalms ‘and that psalme especially How pleasant is thy dwelling place’ because he loved Bruen Stapleford above all places on earth—to have lunch with him at home.

Bruen took the word of God seriously, gave up the hunting and hawking he had loved as a young man, dispensed with his ‘foureteene couple of great mouthed dogges’, disparked his park, had the deer slaughtered and the cuts of meat distributed, demolished his hounds’ kennels and the cockpit, made his packs of cards useless by burning the four knaves in every one and put his backgammon set, its dice and its thirty men ‘into a burning oven which was then heating to bake pies’. In his house, instead of these entertainments, he had set up on desks, in his hall and in his parlour, ‘two goodly faire bibles of the best edition, and largest volume’ for his family and servants to read as ‘continuall residentaries’.

When Bruen knew he was dying, he told Hinde that, hugely loved as he was, he wanted no elaborate mourning. ‘I wil have no blacks [mourning dress]. I love not any proud or pompous funerals.’ He didn’t want any show, nothing in other words beyond the verbal. And then, as he felt death coming on, he said this, the passionate erotic love poetry of the Song of Songs, melded in his mind with the words of Christ on the cross, rising effortlessly to his lips:

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