moved by the Holy Ghost," and between these two points is a great blank, where doubts about the Bible are easily developed, a blank which "Histories of the Bible," going back a few hundred years to Wycliffe's Version, do very little indeed to bridge over.

Such are some of the advantages that would result from a thorough study of this subject. Perhaps even by means of this little sketch, those results may in some small degree be gained to busy men and women who have neither the time nor opportunity for studying it more fully. At any rate the writer desires to keep this object before him while endeavouring to answer questions brought into prominence years ago by the appearance of a new version of the Bible, but which must remain of interest to Christian people as long as the Bible itself shall last.

HOW WE GOT OUR BIBLE.

CHAPTER I.

SOURCES OF OUR BIBLE.

§ 1. The Old Record Chest. § 2. Copyists' Errors. § 3. Necessity of Revision. § 4. Sources of Information open to Revisers. § 5. Special Reasons for Present Revision.

1. LET us begin then by imagining before us the record chest of one of the early Christian churches,say Jerusalem, or Rome, or Ephesus,-about 120 A.D., when sufficient time had elapsed since the completion of the New Testament writings to allow most of the larger churches to procure copies for themselves. In any one church, perhaps, we should not find very much, but if we collect together the documents of some of the leading churches we should have before us something of this sort :

I. Some manuscripts of the Hebrew Old Testament books.

The reader will keep in mind that the Old Testament books were originally written in Hebrew, those of the New Testament in Greek.

II. A good many more of the Old Testament books translated into Greek for general use in the churches, Greek being the language most widely known at the time.

This translation is called the Septuagint, or "Version of the Seventy," from an old tradition of its having been prepared by seventy learned Jews of Alexandria.1 It was made at different times, beginning somewhere about 280 B.C., and was the version commonly used by the Evangelists and Apostles. This accounts for the slight difference we sometimes notice between the Old Testament and their quotations from it, our Old Testament being translated direct from the Hebrew.

III. A few rolls of the Apocryphal Books, written by holy men in the Church, and valued for the practical teaching they contained.

IV. Either the originals or direct copies of the Gospels and the Acts, the Epistles of SS. Paul and Peter and John, and the Book of the Revelation.

§ 2. Now let us remember clearly that as we look into that old record chest of nearly 1800 years ago, we have before us all the sources from which we get our Bible.

1 One story is that King Ptolemy Lagi requested from the Jews at Jerusalem a Greek version of their Scriptures for his great Alexandrian Library; that they sent seventy elders skilled in the Scriptures and in languages; that the king separated them in different cells for their work, and that when they all appeared together before him with their versions, "God was glorified, for they all agreed exactly word for word." The truth probably is, that the version was made by Alexandrian Jews, whether for King Ptolemy or not we cannot tell.

And remember further that these writings were of course all manuscript, i.e., written by the hand, and that copies when needed had each to be written out, letter by letter, at a great expense of time and trouble, and unfortunately, I must add, very often too at some expense of the original correctness. However careful the scribe might be, it was almost impossible, in copying a long and difficult manuscript, to prevent the occurrence of errors. Sometimes he would mistake one letter for another-sometimes, if having the manuscript read to him, he would confound two words of similar sound-sometimes after writing in the last word of a line, on looking up again his eye would catch the same word at the end of the next line, and he would go on from that, omitting the whole line between. Remarks and explanations, too, written in the margin might sometimes in transcribing get inserted in the text.

In these and various other ways errors might creep into the copy of his manuscript. These errors would be repeated by the man that afterwards copied from this, who would also sometimes add other errors of his own. So that it is evident, as copies increased, the errors would be likely to increase with them, and therefore, as a general rule,1

THE EARLIER ANY MANUSCRIPT, THE MORE LIKELY IT IS TO BE CORRECT.

1 This is only a general rule. Of course it is quite possible for a manuscript A.D. 1500 to be copied direct from one of AD. 300, and therefore to be more correct than some a thousand years older

The reader may easily test this for himself by copying a dozen pages of a book, then hand on the copy to a friend to re-copy, and let him pass on to another what he has written, and so have the operation repeated through six or eight different hands before comparing the last copy with the original. It will be an interesting illustration of the danger of errors in copying. Even in printed Bibles, whose proofs have been carefully examined and re-examined, these mistakes creep in. To take two examples out of many :- An edition published in 1653, reads I Cor. vi. 9, " Know ye not that the unrighteous shall inherit the kingdom of God;" and the "Printer's Bible," much sought by book collectors, puts the strange anachronism in King David's mouth, "Printers have persecuted me without a cause" (Ps. cxix. 161).

We know, of course, God might have miraculously prevented scribes and compositors from making these mistakes; but it does not seem to be God's way anywhere to work miracles for us where our own careful use of the abilities He has given would suffice for the purpose.

§3. Although, owing to the special care exercised in transcribing the Scriptures,1 the errors would be in most cases of comparatively trifling importance, yet it is evident from what has been said about the growth

1 As an interesting instance of the care exercised in transcribing important documents, Irenæus, Bishop of Lyons, in the second century, thus writes in one of his own books: "Whosoever thou art who shalt transcribe this book, I charge thee with an oath by our Lord Jesus