ven then, we are told, "many well-disposed people used much to
resort to the hearing thereof, especially when they could get any that
had an audible voice to read to them."... "One John Porter used
sometimes to be occupied in that goodly exercise, to the edifying of
himself as well as others. This Porter was a fresh young man and of a
big stature; and great multitudes would resort thither to hear him,
because he could read well and had an audible voice." But the "goodly
exercise" of readers such as Porter was soon superseded by the continued
recitation of both Old Testament and New in the public services of the
Church; while the small Geneva Bibles carried the Scripture into every
home, and wove it into the life of every English family.

[Sidenote: Its literary influence.]

Religion indeed was only one of the causes for this sudden popularity of
the Bible. The book was equally important in its bearing on the
intellectual developement of the people. All the prose literature of
England, save the forgotten tracts of Wyclif, has grown up since the
translation of the Scriptures by Tyndale and Coverdale. So far as the
nation at large was concerned, no history, no romance, hardly any poetry
save the little-known verse of Chaucer, existed in the English tongue
when the Bible was ordered to be set up in churches. Sunday after
Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered round the Bible in the
nave of St. Paul's, or the family group that hung on its words in the
devotional exercises at home, were leavened with a new literature.
Legend and annal, war song and psalm, State-roll and biography, the
mighty voices of prophets, the parables of Evangelists, stories of
mission journeys, of perils by the sea and among the heathen,
philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, all were flung broadcast
over minds unoccupied for the most part by any rival learning. The
disclosure of the stores of Greek literature had wrought the revolution
of the Renascence. The disclosure of the older mass of Hebrew literature
wrought the revolution of the Reformation. But the one revolution was
far deeper and wider in its effects than the other. No version could
transfer to another tongue the peculiar charm of language which gave
their value to the authors of Greece and Rome. Classical letters
therefore remained in the possession of the learned, that is, of the
few; and among these, with the exception of Colet and More, or of the
pedants who revived a Pag