The House should be grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Mr. Bowis) for raising this subject. This week we have debated important issues but none more important than this. The issue to which my hon. Friend has drawn our attention is the disinheritance of the children of our generation in consequence of the fact that too few teachers or clergy are nowadays accustomed or disposed to use the Authorised Version of the Bible and the 1662 Prayer Book.

Under the law there must be provision for the religious education of all registered pupils at maintained schools, and pupils must have the opportunity to take part in a daily act of collective worship at school.

In their study of English under the national curriculum pupils are required to read some of the works which have been most influential in shaping and refining the English language and its literature. The Authorised Version is proposed as one of those works. So the study of the Authorised Version need not be confined to the catacombs of our educational system. Indeed, there are considerable numbers of teachers—just as there are of clergy—who believe that it is the natural and right thing to do to use the Authorised Version and the 1662 Prayer Book.

Two years ago the then editor of The Spectator, Charles Moore, and the Prayer Book Society offered a prize in memory of Thomas Cranmer, to be competed for by schools whose pupils would recite passages from the Prayer Book. The finalists came from seven schools widely spread, and I understand that a more recent competition enlisted yet more schools. That shows that teachers in all parts of the country still love Cranmer's prayers and believe that children should learn passages of great writing by heart.

The first competition was drawn to the attention of the nation by virtue of a remarkable speech delivered at the presentation of the prize. It was a brilliant and impassioned defence of Cranmer, of the elevated use of language and of the necessity of tradition. The speech contained the following words: What we have to ask ourselves, it seems to me, is whether, by making the words less poetic you really do make them more democratic. Isn't there something rather patronising about the whole assumption? Banality … may be accessible for all, but so is a desert. Those words were spoken encouragingly by a person whom we may expect in due course to be the Supreme Governor of the Church of England.

I said that our children need not be disinherited, but my hon. Friend has pointed to the very real danger that many of them will be.

We wonder sadly why so many people repudiate their spiritual heritage. Elements of the explanation no doubt include the excessive pretensions of scientific rationalism, the deracinated character of a society endlessly unsettled by technological change, the cultural disintegration and anomie promoted by the mass media, the perversion of liberalism which rejects the principle of authority, the diffidence of those whom we might expect to exercise authority, the expectations cultivated in political prospectuses, the aesthetic nihilism fashionable in our age, the reductionism of modern philosophy, and the perennial tendence of human beings to bite the hand that has fed them. Perhaps, however, we can draw some bleak comfort from recognising that the hatred of beauty and tradition, and the sense of spiritual loss are not new. After all, the 1645 Prayer Book was made illegal and replaced by a directory of public worship. In 1655 Jeremy Taylor found himself driven to write: In this sad declension of religion the supplanters are gone out, and are digging down the foundations. In the previous century, William Tyndale was driven out of England; copies of his translation of the New Testament were rounded by and burnt by Bishop Tunstall. Tyndall was strangled by order of the public authorities in, of all places, Brussels.

I might be tempted then to suppose that the confusion, to put it no lower, that characterises the language of the New English Bible reflects a state of affairs no worse than that of the 16th and 17th centuries. But it is dismaying to read the translator's preface to the 1961 New Testament which reads: In doing our work, we have constantly striven to follow our instructions and render the Greek, as we understand it, into the English of the present day, that is, into the natural vocabulary, constructions and rhythms of contemporary speech … since sound scholarship does not always carry with it a delicate sense of style, the Committee appointed a panel of literary advisers, to whom all the work of the translating panel has been submitted. For one thing, the translators seem unaware that prose is not the same as speech. However, the most depressing factor is the dissociation of functions between scholars—"literary advisors"—and clergy—what a falling off from Lancelot Andrewes and the combination in him of such great learning, spiritual depth and literary genius.

Our modern egalitarians do their own cause a disservice in seeking to displace the Authorised Version. The Bible—in a version that compelled the imagination through its linguistic excellence—was once the common culture of our country and other English-speaking countries. In that time, the simple and the scholarly could equally be sages. Allen Bloom has described it by saying: My grandparents were ignorant people by our standards, and my grandfather held only lowly jobs. But their home was spiritually rich because all the things done in it, not only what was specifically ritual, found their origin in the Bible's commandments, and their explanation in the Bible's stories and the commentaries on them, and had their imaginative counterparts in the deeds of the myriad of exemplary heroes. My grandparents found reasons for the existence of their family and the fulfilment of their duties in serious writings, and they interpreted their special sufferings with respect to a great and enobling past. Their simple faith and practices linked them to great scholars and thinkers who dealt with the same material, not from outside or from an alien perspective, but believing as they did, while simply going deeper and providing guidance. There was a respect for real learning, because it had a felt connection with their lives. This is what a community and a history mean, a common experience inviting high and low into a single body of belief. A change in American life may be seen to have been under way by the time Mrs. Scott Fitzgerald made her critical assessment of Ernest Hemingway's prose style as "pretty damned Biblical".

It is estimated that in 1611 about 6 million people spoke English; now perhaps 600 million do. But the grandeurs of the 1611 Bible and the 1662 Prayer Book could again be possessed by them as their heritage. The following phrases, of crystalline beauty, are from Tyndale's New Testament of 1534, carried forward into the Authorised Version: Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you. Teachers can be confident that Tyndale's precise, simple English is entirely accessible and capable of being appropriated by those whose language is the English of today.

The following are phrases from Tyndale's translation of the Gospel according to St. Matthew: With God all things are possible … The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak … The burden and heat of the day … The salt of the earth". They are modern English.

Tyndale, after all, translated from the Koine, the ordinary Greek of day-to-day transactions. His genius was to render the directness of that usage in the rhythmic and candenced English of the Renaissance, the language that was Shakespeare's immediate inheritance.

We do not insist that Shakespeare is rehashed in a modern translation. Shakespeare still pierces and moves those large numbers of people who read him and see his plays. The language of the Authorised Version is for the most part easier than Shakespeare's

But the great thing is to grow up with that language, so that it is part of one's consciousness. Every Sunday, for a good part of my childhood, I was obliged to attend matins at Winchester cathedral—the cathedral of Bishop Andrewes. When now I hear one of Cranmer's Collects I thrill with a sense of rightness and connectedness. The words of the 1662 Prayer Book have formed my sensibility as much as any other influence.

I applaud the teachers who continue to require their pupils to learn great texts by heart and I am glad that oracy forms part of the national curriculum. That metaphor, "by heart", is right, for what one possesses through such learning, while most often it cannot be paraphrased, informs one's whole apprehension of, and feeling for, the world.

Of course the Bible is not merely literature. To teach appreciation of the Bible only as an aesthetic experience is to diminish both it and those whom we teach. To regard the Bible as literature would indeed have been incomprehensible notion in the 17th century. It is written in what C. S. Lewis termed, writing of Milton, the language of ceremony. I hope that teachers will continue to make the Authorised Version part of the experience of worship as well as part of the curriculum. Then their pupils will be able to say in the words of Psalm 119—but let me make it clear that I do not expect them to learn the whole of the psalm— Thy testimonies have I claimed as mine heritage for ever: and why? They are the very joy of my heart. I can express such hopes, but Ministers—those of the Crown anyway—cannot impose. I am told that a little while ago, a letter was received at Church house saying, We are doing God this term. Please send full details and pamphlets. I do not know what reply was sent, but I should like to think that, among the details sent, was a commendation to the teacher to learn by heart—as every teacher surely should—Cranmer's Collect for the second Sunday in Advent: Blessed Lord, who hast caused all holy Scriptures to be written for our learning; Grant that we may in such wise hear them, read, mark, learn and inwardly digest them that, by patience, and comfort of thy holy Word, we may embrace, and ever hold fast the blessed hope of everlasting life, which thou hast given us in our Saviour Jesus Christ. Amen.