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Queen Victoria (1819-1901) was the long-reigning monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
She was once asked by an African prince what was the secret of England's greatness and Britain's glory.
It was a noble and beautiful answer of our Queen…to an African Prince. Our beloved Queen told him, not of the number of her fleet, nor the number of her armies; not the account of her boundless merchandise, nor the details of her inexhaustible wealth. She did not, like Hezekiah, in an evil hour, show the ambassador her diamonds, and her jewels, and her rich ornaments, but handing him a beautifully bound copy of the Bible, she said, 'Tell the Prince that THIS IS THE SECRET OF ENGLAND'S GREATNESS'.
The Christian's Penny Magazine and Friend of the People (London, England: John Snow, 1860), xv.54.
John Wesley (1703-1791) was originally an Anglican priest who, with his brother Charles, is credited with founding Methodism. 
I am a creature of a day, passing through life, as an arrow through the air. I am a spirit come from God, and returning to God: just hovering over the great gulf; till a few moments hence, I am no more seen! I drop into an unchangeable eternity! I want to know one thing, the way to heaven: how to land safe on that happy shore. God himself has condescended to teach the way; for this very end he came from heaven. He hath written it down in a book! O give me that book! At any price, give me the book of God! I have it: here is knowledge enough for me. Let me be homo unius libri [a man of one book].
John Wesley, Sermons on Several Occasions, 2 vols. (New York: B. Waugh and T. Mason, 1836), 1.6.
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) was the 16th President of the United States, serving during the American Civil War and bringing an end to slavery.
In regard to this Great book, I have but to say, it is the best gift God has given to man. All the good the Savior gave to the world was communicated through this book. But for it, we could not know right from wrong. All things most desirable for man's welfare, here and hereafter, are to be found portrayed in it.
Herbert Mitgang, editor, Washington, D.C., in Lincoln's Time: A Memoir of the Civil War Era by the Newspaperman Who Knew Lincoln Best, Noah Brooks (New York: Rinehart, 1958), p. 252.
Charles Dickens (1812-1870) wrote The Life of our Lord in 1849 expressly for his children, without thought of publication, and it was not published until March 1934. He frequently told his children the story of the Gospel. 
The great Victorian novelist wrote to his son,
It is my comfort and my sincere conviction that you are going to try the life for which you are best fitted. I think its freedom and wildness more suited to you than any experiment in a study or office would have been. Try to do to others as you would have them do to you, and do not be discouraged if they fail sometimes. It is much better for you that they should fail in obeying the greatest rule laid down by our Saviour, than that you should. I put a New Testament among your books for the very same reasons and with the very same hopes that made me write an easy account of it for you when you were a little child—because it is the best book that ever was or will be known in the world, and because it teaches you the best lessons by which any human creature who tries to be truthful and faithful to duty can possibly be guided.
John Forster, Life of Dickens, 3 vols. (London, England: Chapman and Hall, 1874), 3.445.
John Ruskin (1819-1900), art critic and social commentator, was also an author and poet and as well as being an accomplished artist. He wrote,
All that I have taught of Art, everything that I have written, whatever greatness there has been in any thought of mine, whatever I have done in my life, has simply been due to the fact that, when I was a child, my mother daily read with me a part of the Bible, and daily made me learn a part of it by heart. How much I owe to my mother for having so exercised me in the Scriptures as to make me grasp them in…their 'concrete whole;' and above all taught me to reverence them as transcending all thought and ordaining all conduct. This she effected, not by her own sayings or personal authority, but simply by compelling me to read the Book thoroughly for myself. As soon as I was able to read with fluency, she began a course of Bible work with me, which never ceased till I went to Oxford. She read alternate verses to me, watching at first every intonation of my voice, and correcting the false ones, till she made me understand the verse, if within my reach, rightly and energetically…she made sure that as soon as I got hold of it at all, I should get hold of it by the right end. In this way she began with the first verse of Genesis, and went straight through to the last verse of the Apocalypse…and began again with Genesis the next day. If a name was hard, the better the exercise in pronunciation; if a chapter was tiresome, the better the lesson in patience… After our chapters (from two or three a day, according to their length, the first thing after breakfast, and no interruption from servants allowed, none from visitors, who either joined in the reading or had to stay upstairs…), I had to learn a few verses by heart, or repeat, to make sure I had not lost, something of what was already known; and, with the chapters above enumerated, I had to learn the whole body of the fine old Scottish paraphrases, which are good, melodious, and forceful verse; and to which, together with the Bible itself, I owe the first cultivation of my ear in sound. It is strange that of all the pieces of the Bible that my mother thus taught me, that which cost me most to learn—Psalm 119—has now become of all the most precious to me in its overflowing and glorious passion of love for the law of God.
Quoted by F. W. Farrar in The Bible: Its Meaning and Supremacy (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), pp. 279-281.
Bishop John Charles Ryle (1816-1900), was an evangelical theologian who was the first Anglican to hold the bishopric of Liverpool—and that at the recommendation of Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.
We owe to the Reformation an English Bible, the liberty for every man, woman, and child in the land to read it. With an English Bible came in the right and duty of private judgment, and the assertion of the great principle of our VIth Article, that 'Holy Scripture contains all things needful to salvation,' and the only rule of faith and practice.Of all the agencies which brought about the overthrow of Popery in this country, the translation of the Bible was the earliest and most powerful. It struck a blow at the root of the whole Romish system. Before a free Bible and fair play for all who used it, the Pope's champions could not long stand. The huge fabric of Popery cracked, shivered, and came to the ground like a pack of cards. With a Bible in every parish church in the land every thoughtful and intelligent Englishman soon saw that the religion of the priests had no warrant in Holy Scripture.
It is a striking and instructive fact that of all the agencies which combined to win the English Reformation, hardly any called forth such bitter opposition as the translation and circulation of the Scriptures…
Nothing seems to have alarmed and enraged the Romish priesthood so much as the spread of English Bibles… The priests knew and felt that their game was up if people once saw the inside of the Bible. You might as well have tried to stop the tide rising at Chepstow, or prevent Jupiter's satellites revolving round him, as stop the progress of the Protestant cause when the laity once began to read the Scriptures… Its leading contents and principles ran through the land like fire, and from that period the Pope's cause in England was shaken to the centre. You that read the Bible daily and 'delight in the law of the Lord,' never forget you owe the Bible to the Reformation.
Bishop J. C. Ryle, What do we owe to the Reformation? (London: Protestant Truth Society, n.d.), p. 11.
About the Authorised Version
Dr. William Lyon Phelps (1865-1943) was an American author, critic and scholar who from 1941 to 1943 served as director of the Hall of Fame for Great Americans. Dr Phelps writes:
Priests, atheists, sceptics, devotees, agnostics, and evangelists, are generally agreed that the Authorized Version of the English Bible is the best example of English literature that the world has ever seen…Everyone who has a thorough knowledge of the Bible may truly be called educated; and no other learning or culture, no matter how extensive or elegant, can, among Europeans and Americans, form a proper substitute. Western civilization is founded upon the Bible… I thoroughly believe in a university education for both men and women; but I believe a knowledge of the Bible without a college course is more valuable than a college course without the Bible.
The Elizabethan period—a term loosely applied to the years between 1558 and 1642—is properly regarded as the most important era in English literature… But the crowning achievement of those spacious days was the Authorized Translation of the Bible, which appeared in 1611. Three centuries of English literature followed, but…the art of English composition reached its climax in the pages of the Bible.
Now as the English-speaking people have the best Bible in the world, and as it is the most beautiful monument ever erected with the English alphabet, we ought to make the most of it, for it is an incomparably rich inheritance, free to all who can read. This means that we ought invariably in the church and on public occasions to use the Authorized Version; all others are inferior.
William Lyon Phelps, Human Nature in the Bible (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1922), pp. 13-14.
Charlton Heston (1923-2008) was a popular American actor who in 1956 played Moses in the film The Ten Commandments. In 1992, an American cable television network released a series of videos entitled Charlton Heston Presents the Bible, in which he read various passages from the Authorised Version.
The King James translation has been described as 'the greatest monument of English prose' as well as 'the only great work of art ever created by a committee'. Both statements are true. Fifty-four scholars worked seven years to produce the work from its extant texts in Aramaic, Hebrew, Greek, Latin, English. Such an undertaking can be expected to produce great scholarship, but hardly writing as spare and sublime as the King James…The authors of several boring translations that have followed over the last fifty years mumble that the KJV is 'difficult', filled with long words. Have a look at the difficult long words that begin the Old Testament, and end the Gospels… There's no comparable writing in the language…
Over the past several centuries it's been the single book in most households, an enormous force in shaping the development of the English language. Carried around the world by missionaries, it provided the base by which English is about to become the lingua franca of the world in the next century.
Charlton Heston, In the Arena: An Autobiography (New York, USA: Berkley Trade Publishers, 1997), pp. 554-555.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), the great Irish playwright, penned more than sixty plays during his long life. 
The translation was extraordinarily well done because to the translators what they were translating was not merely a curious collection of ancient books written by different authors in different stages of culture, but the word of God divinely revealed through His chosen and expressly inspired scribes. In this conviction they carried out their work with boundless reverence and care and achieved a beautiful artistic result…they made a translation so magnificent that to this day the common human Britisher or citizen of the United States of North America accepts and worships it as a single book by a single author, the book being the Book of Books and the author being God.
Quoted in G. S. Paine, The Men Behind the King James Version (Grand Rapids, MI, USA: Baker Book House, 1977), pp. 182-183.
Sir Winston Churchill
(1874-1965) was a British politician who became Prime Minister, leading the United Kingdom during World War II.
At this time [early 17th century] a splendid and lasting monument was created to the genius of the English-speaking people. The scholars who produced this masterpiece [the Authorised Version] are mostly unknown and unremembered. But they forged an enduring link, literary and religious, between the English-speaking people of the world.
Winston Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, 4 vols. (London: Cassells, 1974), vol. 1.
Ronald Reagan (1911-2004) was 40th President of the United States.
What would you say if someone decided Shakespeare's plays, Charles Dickens's novels, or the music of Beethoven could be rewritten and improved?… Writing in the journal The Alternative, Richard Hanser, author of The Law and the Prophets and Jesus: What Manner of Man is This? has called attention to something that is more than a little mind boggling. It is my understanding that the Bible (both the Old and New Testaments) has been the best-selling book in the entire history of printing.Now another attempt has been made to improve it. I say another because there have been several fairly recent efforts to 'make the Bible more readable and understandable'. But as Mr. Hanser so eloquently says 'For more than three and a half centuries, its language and its images have penetrated more deeply into the general culture of the English-speaking world, and been more deeply treasured, than anything else ever put on paper.' He then quotes the irreverent H. L. Mencken, who spoke of it as purely a literary work and said it was, 'probably the most beautiful piece of writing in any language'.
They were, of course, speaking of the Authorized Version, the one that came into being when the England of King James was scoured for translators and scholars. It was a time when the English language had reached its peak of richness and beauty.
Now we are to have The Good News Bible which will be in 'the natural English of everyday adult conversation'. I'm sure the scholars and clergymen supervised by the American Bible Society were sincerely imbued with the thought that they were taking religion to the people with their Good News Bible, but I can't help feeling we should instead be taking the people to religion and lifting them with the beauty of language that has outlived the centuries.
Ronald Reagan on the King James Bible, transcript of Reagan's radio address aired September 6, 1977, www.bbcenglish.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=168:ronald-reagon-on-the-king-james-bible&catid=63:performance
Prof. Mark A. Noll (1946-) is professor of history at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana who in 2005 was named by Time Magazine amongst the twenty-five most influential evangelicals in America.
In 1911 the English-speaking world paused to mark the 300th anniversary of the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible, with American political leaders foremost in the chorus of exaltation. To former president Theodore Roosevelt, the Bible translation was 'the Magna Carta of the poor and the oppressed…the most democratic book in the world.' Soon-to-be president Woodrow Wilson said much the same thing: 'The Bible (with its individual value of the human soul) is undoubtedly the book that has made democracy and been the source of all progress.'Americans at the time mostly agreed with these sentiments, because the impact of the KJV was everywhere so obvious…with no occasion more memorable than March 4, 1865, when four quotations from the KJV framed Abraham Lincoln's incomparable Second Inaugural Address [Genesis 3.19; Matthew 18.7; Matthew 7.1; and Psalm 19.9].
Because the KJV was so widely read for religious purposes, it had also become a source of public ideals. Because it was so central in the churches, and because the churches were so central to culture, the KJV functioned also as a common reservoir for the language. Hundreds of phrases…and thousands of words…were in the common speech because they had first been in this translation…
Today the legacy of the KJV remains fixed in the common speech, even if awareness of the language's debt to this translation is fading… Whether any modern translation of the Scriptures…can anchor the culture as the KJV once did, is a question worth serious consideration in the run-up to 2011 and the 400th anniversary of this unsurpassed cultural force.
Mark A. Noll, The American Bible Tradition: The King James Version used to be our common text, The Wall Street Journal, 7 July 2006. www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110008620
Merit Students Encyclopedia is an American encyclopaedia aimed at students in the upper high school years through university.
The greatest English Bible is the Authorised, or King James Version. Based on Tyndale's translation and original texts, it was produced in 1611 by six groups of churchmen at the command of King James I. The King James Bible became the traditional Bible of English-speaking Protestants. Its dignified and beautiful style strongly influenced the development of literature in the English language. The influence can be seen in the works of John Bunyan, John Milton, Herman Melville, and many other writers.
William Darrach Halsey, ed. dir. and Emanuel Friedman, ed.-in-chief, Merit Students Encyclopedia, 20 vols. (London: Crowell-Collier Educational Corporation, 1972), 3.137-138.
Professor Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895), the English biologist and proponent of Darwin's theory of evolution, termed himself an agnostic. About the Authorised Version he said,
I have always been strongly in favour of secular education, in the sense of education without theology; but I confess I have been no less seriously perplexed to know by what practical measures the religious feeling, which is the essential basis of conduct, was to be kept up, in the present utterly chaotic state of opinion on these matters, without the use of the Bible…and there still remains in this old literature a vast residuum of moral beauty and grandeur. And then consider the great historical fact that, for three centuries, this book has been woven into the life of all that is best and noblest in English history; that it has become the national epic of Britain, and is familiar to noble and simple, from John-o'-Groat's House to Land's End…that it is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of a mere literary form… By the study of what other book could children be so much humanised and made to feel that each figure in that vast historical procession fills, like themselves, but a momentary space in the interval between two eternities…
Thomas Henry Huxley, 'The School Boards: What They Can Do, And What They May Do', Read book online, www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/23086.
The Bible has been the Magna Charta [sic] of the poor and of the oppressed; down to modern times, no State has had a constitution in which the interests of the people are so largely taken into account, in which the duties, so much more than the privileges, of rulers, are insisted upon, as that drawn up for Israel in Deuteronomy and in Leviticus; nowhere is the fundamental truth that the welfare of the State, in the long run, depends on the uprightness of the citizen, so strongly laid down…I do not say that even the highest biblical ideal is exclusive of others or needs no supplement. But I do believe that the human race is not yet, possibly may never be, in a position to dispense with it.
Thomas H. Huxley, Prologue to Controverted Questions, in Charles Blinderman, The Huxley File, math.clarku.edu/huxley/CE5/ProCQ.html
F. W. Faber (1814-1863) was a Roman Catholic priest.
Speaking of the uncommon beauty and marvellous English of the Authorised Version, he said:
It lives on the ear, like a music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells, which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of the national seriousness… The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses… It is the representative of a [man's] best moments, and all that there has been about him of soft and gentle and pure and penitent and good speaks to him for ever out of his English Bible… It is his sacred thing, which doubt never dimmed, and controversy never soiled. In the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him, whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible.
F. W. Faber, The Characteristics of the Lives of the Saints, p. 116, in R. C. Trench, English Past and Present, 18th ed. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, & Co. Ltd., 1905), p. 40.
Lord Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1st Baron Macaulay (1800-1859) was a British poet and historian who wrote extensively on British history.
The English Bible—a book which, if everything else in our language should perish, would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power.
Thomas Macaulay, On John Dryden, quoted by Farrar in The Bible: Its Meaning and Supremacy (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), p. 259.
Dean Frederic William Farrar (1831-1903) was Dean of Canterbury and a prodigious writer.
It was the Bible which created the prose literature of England, of which the Authorised Version was the noblest monument; it was the Bible which gave fire and nobleness to her language; it was the Bible which turned a dead oppression into a living Church; it was the Bible which put to flight the nightmare of ignorance before the rosy dawn of progress; it was the Bible which made each free Christian man feel some grandeur in the beatings of his own heart, as of a being who stood face to face with God, responsible to Him alone, having 'the dignity of God's image upon him, and the sign of His redemption marked visibly upon his forehead.' It was the Bible which saved England from sinking into a tenth-rate power as a vassal of cruel, ignorant, superstitious Spain, whose Dominicans and tyrants would have turned her fields into slaughterhouses as they turned those of the Netherlands, and would have made her cities reek as she made Seville reek with the bale-fires of her Inquisition.…But this is certain: so far as, and so long as, England remains true to that simple, unadulterated Word of God which has been purchased for us by the misery of exiles and the blood of martyrs; so far and so long as she stands fast in the freedom wherewith God has made her free, and is not again entangled with the yoke of bondage—so far and so long as she refuses to be either driven into indifference by disgust, or seduced into delusion by false religion; so far and so long will she maintain the honours of this great people… Let England cling to her open Bible; let her learn from it the broad truths of primitive Christianity, and be faithful to them; let her teach it to her children, and her children to their children, and their children to generations yet unborn, and then no wind that blows, no storm that beats, will shake her invincible foundations, for she will be founded upon a rock! But let her apostatise from its pure lessons into humanly invented falsities, and I would not give fifty years' purchase either for her greatness or for the stability of her Church. The world has no other trumpet of peace save Holy Scripture for souls at war; no other weapon to slay terrible passions; no other teaching to quench the heart's raging fires. This book alone makes mortals immortal, makes immortals gods.
Farrar, The Bible: Its Meaning and Supremacy (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1901), pp. 304-305.
J. C. Philpot (1802–1869) was a clergyman but in 1835 left the Church of England and joined what would later become the Gospel Standard Baptists. Discussing whether it would be desirable to have a new translation of the Scriptures, he said:
It would unsettle the minds of thousands, as to which was the word of God, the old translation or the new. What a door it would open for the workings of infidelity, or the temptations of Satan! What a gloom too it would cast over the minds of many of God's saints, to have those passages which had been applied to their souls translated in a different way, and how it would seem to shake all their experience of the power and preciousness of God's Word.But besides this, there would be two Bibles spread through the land, the old and the new, and what confusion would this create in almost every place!
…If the revision and re-translation were once to begin, where would it end?… Once set up a notice, 'The old Bible to be mended,' and there would be plenty of workmen, who, trying to mend the cover, would pull the pages to pieces… All our good Bible terms would be so mutilated that they would cease to convey the Spirit's meaning, and instead of the noble simplicity, faithfulness, and truth of our present version, we should have a Bible that nobody would accept as the Word of God, to which none could safely appeal, and on which none implicitly rely.
Instead of our good old Saxon Bible, simple and solid, with few words obsolete, and alike majestic and beautiful, we should have a modern English translation in pert and flippant language of the day. Besides its authority, as the word of God, our present version is the great English Classic—generally accepted as the standard of the English language…
The present English Bible [Authorised Version] has been blessed to thousands of the saints of God; and not only so, it has become part of our national inheritance which we have received unimpaired from our fathers, and are bound to hand down unimpaired to our children. It is, we believe, the grand bulwark of Protestantism; the safeguard of the Gospel, and the treasure of the Church; and we should be traitors in every sense of the word if we consented to give it up to be rifled by the sacrilegious hands of the Puseyites, concealed Papists, German Neologians, infidel divines, Arminians, Socinians and the whole tribe of the enemies of God and godliness.
J.C. Philpot, Merits of the Authorized Version, April, 1857, www.radiomissions.org/gleanings/authvers.html.
Adam Nicolson (1957-), 5th Baron Carnock, wrote an article for The Daily Telegraph just prior to the publication of his book Power and Glory, known in North America as God's Secretaries: The Making of the King James Bible.
The King James Bible is a conundrum. It is the richest, most passionate (and most bought) of all the works of English prose. It is full of grandeur and a vivid, heart-gripping immediacy…The language of the King James is that of majesty, grace, stateliness, scale, and power…
Never had so many scholars been used for a Bible translation…
The pivot was Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster Abbey, then Bishop in succession of Chichester, Ely and Winchester, court preacher and scholar, fluent in 15 modern languages and six ancient, gifted with a musical understanding of English that is responsible for much of the final effect of translation. He was a man with an extraordinarily tender relationship with his God, praying five hours every morning, and was said to have been in tears for most of them…
There is no desire to please here; only a belief in the overwhelming divine authority… Yawning between now and then is the great invention of liberalism, the importance of individual freedom. Nothing like the King James Version could ever be made again.
Adam Nicolson, 'The Greatest Story Every Written', Daily Telegraph, 1 June 2002.
Bishop D. A. Thompson (20th century) was an Anglican minister and former chairman of the Bible Christian Unity Fellowship.
Those who stand in the 'old paths' (Jer. 6.16) of morality and of evangelical religion are content to bear reproach, confident that the Protestant Reformed theology, built upon the Textus Receptus and the King James Version, will be vindicated before the throne of God.
D. A. Thompson in Truth Unchanged, Unchanging: A Selection of Articles from the Bible League Quarterly 1912-82, S. M. Houghton, ed., (Abingdon: The Bible League, 1984), p. 496.