One of the greatest questions of our day is how modern civilisation and Christianity can go on in harmony. One can approach this question by several ways, but historical investigation has always proved to be the surest. The author has in mind to write in German a full "History of the Bible," when time will allow. Meanwhile this brief sketch may prove useful. Readers who look for references will find most of them in an article contributed by the present writer to Dr. J. Hastings's Encyclopædia of

There is a small book; one can put it in one's pocket, and yet all the libraries of America, numerous as they are, would hardly be large enough to hold all the books which have been inspired by this one little volume. The reader will know what I am speaking of; it is the Bible, as we are used to call it—the Book, the book of mankind, as it has properly been called. It has been commented upon, treated in every way, but, curious to say, hardly any one has attempted to trace its history through the

After the persecution by Diocletian a new era began. Constantine proclaimed tolerance, and by and by Christianity became the religion of the empire. The victory of Christianity was a victory of the Bible as well. This finds its expression in the remarkable fact that the first Christian emperor, the immediate successor of those who persecuted the Bible and tried to destroy it, ordered fifty splendid copies of the Bible to be prepared at his expense for the churches of the newly founded capital, C

From the fourth century on the Germans, tribe by tribe, crossed the Danube and the Rhine and entered the boundaries of the Roman empire. Here part of them settled near the frontier, part took service in the Roman army. But the more numerous they became, the more hostile they were. At last the Roman empire in the West broke down, German kingdoms taking its place. It is a long and cruel history, this period of "Völkerwanderungen" as it is usually called in German, the period of the great migration

The Middle Ages, the dark Middle Ages, that is what we are wont to call the period we now enter in our journey through the centuries. Scholars of the sixteenth century called it so, when they looked back to the classical period, from which they drew all their light and inspiration. The centuries between counted for nothing; they seemed to be barbarous, uneducated; the humanistic scholar would simply drop them out of the world's history. Time passed and men became enthusiastic about the beauties

Mediæval civilisation has a twofold aspect. It looks backward, to the old church and the old Roman empire; so far it is Biblical and classical. But it also looks forward, to the development of the nations and later to the development of the individual personality, as this has been realised in the Renaissance; so far it is secular and, in a way, modern. In the earlier part of the Middle Ages the nations did not feel strong enough by themselves. They were parts of the empire, and all children of t

We have been led in the last chapters far back into the Middle Ages. Now we approach the great time of discoveries. It is difficult to say who made the most important discovery, Columbus crossing the Atlantic to find a new world, in which a new civilisation was to arise, or Gutenberg inventing the art of printing and thereby revolutionising the world of intellectual life and consequently the history of the Bible. During the last centuries of the Middle Ages the Bible had been much copied. At the

The Reformation gave the Bible a new position—not that there had been no Bible before, nor that the Bible had had no influence. We have seen that there were numbers of Bibles, in Latin as well as in the vernacular, and that the Bible had been one of the foundations of mediæval civilisation, yet it was only by Luther's translation and the other versions made on his model that the Bible became a really popular book, and it was only by the Reformation that the Bible was established as the authority

Having made our way through the centuries, we now approach our own time, and at once we remark two facts: Never before had the Bible such a circulation as it has now gained. On the other hand, it seems to have lost most of its influence. We must look at these two facts before we raise the question what value the Bible has for the civilisation of to-day. Printing greatly facilitated the circulation of the Bible and, as the result of the Reformation, it had become the book of the Christian family.