A RENOWNED BOOK IS A LIVING ORGANISM: Months, years, or centuries may go into its gestation. When finally composed and written down, it said to be born, but only born. It then grows and develops through the interpretations of generation after generation of readers, critics, editors, and translators, each adding something, great or little, to its expanding magnitude. The life of the Bible, above all other books, is a life made up of countless lives, embodying their joys and agonies, their visions, their defeats and aspirations. Four thousand years cling about it. A full millennium of myths and legends passed into it; another millennium was consumed in the writing; bitter battles over canon and creed occupied a third; a fourth has seen the ever-continuing translations into modern tongues. No individual, no Caesar or Napoleon could impart in the world's history as this book. Wars, reformations, martyrdoms, religions, lie heavy on its head; men fought and died over its meaning; down through the ages it has continued to evolve, affecting for good and also for ill millions and millions of lives. THE MISSIONARIES went forth to Christianize the Northern tribes with the Bible in their hands. It's simple touching stories of piety and suffering won the hearts of the rude tribesmen as could no other appeal. Without the Bible, the medieval Church would have been powerless accomplished its enormous task of bringing a thousand warring nations and sub-nations, of divergent stock and traditions, into some kind of spiritual unity accepted by the entire Europe, not merely nominally but actually, the same spirituality, with the same general code of moral obligations for all, was a testimony primarily to the enduring efficacy of the Bible. In the beginning, vernacular renderings of the Bible were encouraged, and wherever this occurred its fertilizing influence was soon apparent. Especially was this the case in England where, aside from Beowulf and a few fragments, Anglo-Saxon literature began with paraphrases and translations of the Bible. For the English-speaking peoples special interest attaches to these early Anglo-Saxon undertakings. Like the prophetical books of the Bible, they were born of men's need in time of turmoil and distress, when the few Christians in the British Isles stood in danger of being wiped out by the Danish invaders even as the Hebrews had been environed by the hostile Assyrians and Babylonians. Being special objects of attack from the looting Danes, the little centers of learning in the monasteries founded by the missionaries, such as those at Ely, Wearmouth, and Yarrow, on the isle of Lindisfarne, and at Lastingham in the North Riding, were one and all decimated by the great plague of 664 which took particularly heavy toll in the congested quarters of the monks. It was in this period of terror and in the exposed Yorkshire town of Streonshalh (later to be sacked by the Danes and renamed Whitby) that the work of Biblical translation commenced, calmly and serenely, in the Benedictine monastery founded by Saint Hilda.Not until the fourth century A.D. was it called the Bible. Saint John Chrysostom, the golden-mouthed, well deserved that sobriquet when he named the collection of Jewish and Christian sacred scriptures the Bible-one book, the Book. For in spite of the length of time consumed in its creation and in spite of the greatest diversity in the literary and moral value of the various parts, the unity of the Bible is its most compelling feature, so compelling that centuries after the original work completed, when men of other races and languages sat down translating it, although they usually collaborated in large groups, nevertheless under the mysterious secret guidance of the Holy Spirit they often found themselves writing as one man.