tions, it is stated that "the Board of Publication is probaldy more largely indebted to Dr. Engles than to anj' other one man for its existence and its usefulness, eppeciall)' during the first twenty years of its history." Besides his constant editorial work, he wrote a num- ber of small books on practical religion, many of which had a wide circulation. Of one of them, the Soldier's Pocket-book, in English and German, 300,000 were cir- culated among our soldiers during the civil war. He died in Philadelphia Oct. 12, 18G7. — American Annual Cyclopadia, vii, 296.
English Versions of the Bible. Passing over the lives of the individual translators, the long struggle with the indifTerence or opposition of men in power, the religious condition of the people as calling for, or affected bj', the appearance of the translation, the time, and place, and form of the successive edi- tions by which the demand, when once created, was supplied — all of which is given under more appropri- ate titles — we shall here aim to give an account of the several versions as they appeared ; to ascertain the cjualifications of the translators for the work which they undertook, and the principles on whicli they act- ed ; to form an estimate of the final result of their la- bors in the received version, and, as consequent on this, of the necessity or desirableness of a new or re- vised translation ; and, finalh', to give such a survey of the literature of the subject as may help the reader to obtain a fuller knowledge for himself. In doing this we shall substantiall_y adopt so much of Prof. Plumtre's art. in Smith's Diet, of the Bible, s. v. Ver- sions, as relates to the subject. The present article has been carefully revised by the Rev. T. J. Conant, D.D., of Brooklyn.
I. Early Translations. — It was asserted by Sir Thomas More, in his anxiety to establish a point against Tj'ndal, that he had seen English translations of the Bible which had been made before Wyclifl'e, and that these were approved by the bishops, and were allowed by them to be read by la3-men, and even by devout women (Di(dogues, ch. viii-xiv, col. 82). There seem good grounds, however, for doubting the accu- racy of this statement. No such translations— ver- sions, i. e. of the entire Scriptures — are now extant. No traces of them appear in any contemporary writer. Wj'clifte's great comjilaint is that there is no transla- tion (Forshall and Madden, Wycliffe's Bible, Pref. p. xxi, Prol. p. 59). The Constitutions of archbishop Arundel (A.D. 1408) mention two only, and these are WyclifFe's own, and the one based on his and com- pleted after his death. JNlore's statement must there- fore be regarded either as a rlietorical exaggeration of the fiict that parts of the Bible had been previously translated, or as arising out of a mistake as to the date of ]MSS. of the WyclifFe version. The history of the English Bilde will therefore begin, as it has begun hitherto, with the work of the first great reformer. One glance, however, we may give, in passing, to the earlier history of the English Churcli, and connect some of its most honored names with the great work of making the trutlis of Scripture, or parts of the books themselves, if not the Bible as a whole, accessible to the people. We may think of Ca>dmon as embodying tlie whole history of Uie Bible in the alliterative metre of Anglo-Saxon poetry (Bede, Hist. Eccl. iv, 24) ; of Aldhelm, bishop of Sherborne, in the 7th century, as rendering the I'salter ; of Bede, as translating in the last hours of his life the Gospel of John (Epist. Cuth- herti); of Alfred, setting forth in his mother tongue, as the great ground-work of his legislation, the four chap- ters of Exodus (xx-xxiii) that contained the first code of the laws of Israel (PauH's Life of Alfred, chap. v). The wishes of the great king extended further. He desired that "all tlie free-born youth of his kingdom sliould be able to read the English Scriptures" ["En- ^'lisc gewritt," whicli, however, may merely denote English literature ui general] {Ibid.). Portions of the
ENGLISH VERSIOXS
209
ENGLISH VERSIONS
Bible, some of the Psalms, and extracts from other books, were translated by him for his own use and that of his children. The traditions of a later date, seeing in him the representative of all that was good in the old Saxon time, made him tiie translator of the wliole 15il)le {Ibid., supp. to chap. v).