In 1804 the British and Foreign Bible Society was formed, and proceeded to work on the principle of buying the cheapest Bibles it could and trusting to the printers for accuracy. The American Revolution had erected a new Bible-reading nation; an effort made in its first Congress to restrict the printing of the book to licensed houses was cut short by the first amendment to the Constitution, and the book was thrown into the hands of the trade at large, witli any- thing but a beneficial effect on its general integrity. To crown all, the English printers became careless in supplying the foreign market. Charles Knight tells us of' a Bible so full of typographical errors that its printers dare not publish it in England, and he was assured " we had to send the whole edition to Amer- ica!"
The editions of 1800 and 1813, though adopted as standards by the Protestant Episcopal Church, were but careful "reprints of Blayney without further edi- torial care.
3. The American Bible Society's Revision. — This so- ciety was formed in 1816, and proceeded to print its own Bibles, thus making itself responsible for their correctness. For the first thirty years it seems to have followed almost any respectable copy that came to hand, disregarding discrepancies. But in so many editions as were now produced in England and here, these differences were constantly increasing in num- ber. They were chiefly in punctuation, the use of capitals and italics, and such minor points. At length, in 1847. these had accumulated to such an extent that the proof-readers of the Society really did not know what to follow. The matter was now referred to the Board of Managers of the Society, and in February, 1848, they resolved to have a thorough collation of the English Bible made, and appointed Rev. J. W; McLane, D.D., of the (New-School) Presbyterian Church of Williamsburg, N. Y., to proceed with it. Accordingly, recent copies from the four "standard" British houses were obtained, an American Bible So- ciety's copy was the fifth, and the edition of 1011 the sixth. Blayney was ignored. These were carefully compared throughout ; every variation, no matter how minute, noted ; and this comparison furnished the data whence to prepare the text of a future edition. The number of variations found was about twenty-foul thousand. The Apocrypha formed no part of the work. The rules governing the formation of this standard text were simple. The reading of a majority
of the
'sith" into "since" in two places, though he left it copies was to be followed; when the three English
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copies agreed as to the use of the hyphen, their usage ■was to be accepted. In other matters, where each copy was inconsistent with itself, a system was agreed on. For instance, each copy had in one place " a high- way," in another "an highway." So, too, every copy had sometimes "a husband" and "an husband," "a hole" and "an hole," "a hill" and "an hill," "a hammer" and "an hammer," and so on. Here the strict grammatical rule was enforced. The distinction between "0" and "Oh," which had been lost sight of, was brought out, either form being used, as the sense of the passage required. In capital letters the words "Spirit" and "Scripture" were found very ir- regular ; the first was made to be capital when refer- ring to the Spirit of God, not elsewhere ; the second, when referring to the whole volume. Some spellings, now obsolete, were reformed, as "spunge," "sope," " cuckow," "plaister," "rasor," "morter," "as- swaged," and others; and, what was of more import- ance, some names of Old-Testament characters given in the New Testament, and there spelled according to the Greek, were changed to the ordinary Old-Testa- ment spelling. Thus "Juda" was changed to "Ju- dah," because it was already spelled so in the Old Testament; " Gedeon" to "Gideon," "Jephthae" to " Jephthah," " Sina," to " Sinai," "Chanaan" to "Ca- naan," "Core" to "Korah," and so with some — not all — others. In the words of the text the following changes from the modern copies were made. In Josh. xix, 2, " and Sheba" was made " or Sheba." In Ruth iii, 15, "she went" was changed to "he went." In Solomon's Song ii, 7, "he please" was made "she please." In Isa. i, 16, "wash you" was altered to " wash ye." But all of these corrections were accord- ing to the original edition, which had been departed from in each case wrongly. Farther, in Matt, xii, 41, " in judgment" was made " in the judgment," because the Greek required it, and very manj' early English copies had it, though not the first. Also in Solomon's Song iii, 5, and viii, 4, the same change was made as in ii,7 ; for, though the original edition here read " he,", the probability, all things considered, was that it was but a typographical error in each case. In prosecuting the collation, the. headings of the chapters came under notice. These often differed ; but, so far as they agreed with the edition of 1611, or that of Blayney, they were frequently faulty. Some were distinctly and positive- ly false, as those to Daniel viii, Isaiah xli, Zech. xii; others were comments on the text, as those to Psa. xlix, Dan. xi, and the whole of Solomon's Song; others were incomprehensibly clumsy, as the few first of Acts; some positively shocking, as "the Lord re- fuseth to go as he had promised with his people" (Exod. xxxiii) ; " Samuel sent by God under pretense of a sacrifice" (1 Sam. xvi). These headings had not been prepared by the body of the original forty-seven translators, but by one of their number and one other person; they never were considered as forming part of the version; they had been extensively altered be- fore, both by Blayney and by many anonymous par- ties, and therefore the committee under whose care the collation was going on resolved to remodel these where necessary . Wherever "Christ" or "the Church" was mentioned in any Old-Testament heading, "Mes- siah" and "Zion," the equivalent words used in the ( Mil-Testament text, were substituted, in order to avoid comment. The marginal references were again recti- fied, many errors corrected, and their number, upon the whole, diminished. A very few marginal read- ings were added, chiefly explanatory of proper names. To .Matt, xxiii, 24, where "at" is now generally con- sidered to be a misprint from the first for "out," a nole was put, "Or, strain out;" and to ".Tesus," in Acts vii, 46, the committee put the note, "That is, Joshua," as the translators themselves had done in Ileb. iv, 8. (See, on the whole subject, the Society's