“But far greater was its effect on the character of the people. The whole temper of the nation felt the change. A new conception of life and humanity superseded the old and a renewed moral and religious impulse spread through every class.”
BS. The English were known for their faith long before the KJV. They were also known for their rowdiness, violence, and drunkenness long after it.
The crown copyright pertains only to the UK. In any other place, the KJV is public domain.
If a person has a copy with the message from the translators it makes for interesting reading. The comment is made that should it become necessry they would revisit their work and revise as necessary.
So while a monumental work in it's time even more accurate translations are readily available due to the diligence of scholars and the thousands of manuscripts now available.
Then they ought to read from the Geneva Bible. Most of the KJV was lifted from it. King James I didn’t like the marginal notes of the reformers so he had a new version printed without notes.
Interesting reading from: http://www.conservapedia.com/Geneva_Bible
Royal authority and its limits
The Geneva editors, in their notes, spoke of limits on royal authority, and this is probably why James I specifically ordered a translation of the Bible without annotation. He construed any limit on royal authority as a challenge to his own authority. For example, the note for Exodus 1:19 (KJV) says the following of the Hebrew midwives who disobeyed the Pharaoh in refusing to kill Hebrew boy-children at birth:[14]
“
Their disobedience herein was lawful, but their dissembling evil.
”
The very notion that the disobedience of a royal command might be a lawful act would be anathema to a king who believed that he ruled by divine right and answered only to God and not to any of his subjects.[4] The footnote for Exodus 1:22 (KJV) would surely have been worse:
“
When tyrants cannot prevail by craft, they burst forth into open rage.
”
The firm belief of the editors of the Tolle Lege edition is that these marginal notes were the catalyst not only for the furtherance (such as it was) of the reformation in England, but also, and more to the point, for the political revolutions in the English-speaking world[2]—presumably beginning with the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and continuing with the American Revolution of 1776-83. They hold this belief even though the Geneva Bible ceased printing in 1644, long before William and Mary and more than a century before the American Revolution. Brown[4] points out that the Church of England retained all of the trappings and hierarchical structure of the Roman Catholic Church, the chief difference being that the Archbishop of Canterbury answered no longer to the Pope of Rome but directly to the British crown.
As pure literature, the KJV’s language is in a league by itself. The only words that even come close are Shakespeare’s, and then only rarely. The English of the KJV Bible is the core of the language around which our modern idiom coalesced.