THERE are three great Book-religions--Judaism, Christianity, and Mohammedanism.Other religions have their sacred writings,but they do not hold them in the same regard asdo these three. Buddhism and Confucianismcount their books rather records of their faiththan rules for it, history rather than authoritativesources of belief. The three great Book-religionsyield a measure of authority to theirsacred books which would be utterly foreign tothe thought of other faiths.Yet among the three named are two very distinctattitudes. To the Mohammedan the languageas well as the matter of the Koran issacred. He will not permit its translation. Itsoriginal Arabic is the only authoritative tonguein which it can speak. It has been translatedinto other tongues, but always by adherents ofother faiths, never by its own believers. TheHebrew and the Christian, on the other hand,but notably the Christian, have persistentlysought to make their Bible speak all languages atall times.It is a curious fact that a Book written in onetongue should have come to its largest power inother languages than its own. The Bible meansmore to-day in German and French and Englishthan it does in Hebrew and Chaldaic and Greek--more even than it ever meant in those languages.There is nothing just like that in literary history.It is as though Shakespeare should after a whilebecome negligible for most readers in English,and be a master of thought in Chinese and Hindustani,or in some language yet unborn.We owe this persistent effort to make the Biblespeak the language of the times to a convictionthat the particular language used is not thegreat thing, that there is something in it whichgives it power and value in any tongue. No bookwas ever translated so often. Men who haveknown it in its earliest tongues have realized thattheir fellows would not learn these earliesttongues, and they have set out to make it speakthe tongue their fellows did know. Some haveprotested that there is impiety in making itspeak the current tongue, and have insisted thatmen should learn the earliest speech, or at leastaccept their knowledge of the Book from thosewho did know it. But they have never stoppedthe movement. They have only delayed it.The first movement to make the Scripturespeak the current tongue appeared nearly threecenturies before Christ. Most of the Old Testamentthen existed in Hebrew. But the Jews hadscattered widely. Many had gathered in Egyptwhere Alexander the Great had founded the citythat bears his name. At one time a third of thepopulation of the city was Jewish. Many ofthe people were passionately loyal to their oldreligion and its Sacred Book. But the currenttongue there and through most of the civilizedworld was Greek, and not Hebrew. As always,there were some who felt that the Book and itsoriginal language were inseparable. Others revealedthe disposition of which we spoke a momentago, and set out to make the Book speakthe current tongue. For one hundred and fiftyyears the work went on, and what we call theSeptuagint was completed. There is a prettylittle story which tells how the version got itsname, which means the Seventy--that KingPtolemy Philadelphus, interested in collecting allsacred books, gathered seventy Hebrew scholars,sent them to the island of Pharos, shut them upin seventy rooms for seventy days, each makinga translation from the Hebrew into the Greek.When they came out, behold, their translationswere all exactly alike! Several difficulties appearin that story, one of which is that seventy menshould have made the same mistakes withoutdepending on each other. In addition, it is nothistorically supported, and the fact seems to bethat the Septuagint was a long and slow growth,issuing from the impulse to make the SacredBook speak the familiar tongue. And, thoughit was a Greek translation, it virtually displacedthe original, as the English Bible has virtuallydisplaced the Heb --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.