Of all recipes for good or noble writing that which enjoins the writer to be careful about the matter and never mind the manner, is the most sure.

The translators had the handling of matter of the gravest dignity and momentousness, and their sense of reverence kept them right in their treatment of it.

They cared passionately for the truth; they were virtually anonymous and not ambitious of originality or literary fame; they had no desire to stand between the book and its readers.

It followed that they cultivated that naked plainness and spareness which makes their work supreme.

The Authorized Version is the last and greatest of those English translations which were the fruit of Renaissance scholarship and pioneering.