But there shall be no gloom to her that was in anguish.  In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time hath he made it glorious, by the way of the sea, beyond Jordan, Galilee of the nations.

The people that walked in darkness have seen a great light:  they that dwelt in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined.  Thou hast multiplied the nation, thou hast increased their joy:  they joy before thee according to the joy in harvest, as men rejoice when they divide the spoil.

     For the yoke of his burden, and the staff of his shoulder, the
     rod of his oppressor, thou hast broken as in the day of Midian.

     For all the armour of the armed man in the tumult, and the
     garments rolled in blood, shall even be for burning, for fuel of
     fire.

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given; and the government shall be upon his shoulder:  and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

I say (knowing no Hebrew, merely assuming our Revisers to be at least no worse scholars than the forty-seven) that here, with the old cadences kept so far as possible, we are given sense in place of nonsense:  and I ask you to come to the Revised Version with a fair mind.  I myself came to it with some prejudice; in complete ignorance of Hebrew, and with no more than the usual amount of Hellenistic Greek.  I grant at once that the Revised New Testament was a literary fiasco; largely due (if gossip may be trusted) to trouble with the Greek Aorist, and an unwise decision—­in my opinion the most gratuitously unwise a translator can take—­to use one and the same English word, always and in every connotation, as representing one and the same Greek word:  for in any two languages few words are precisely equivalent.  A fiasco at any rate the Revised New Testament was, deserving in a dozen ways and in a thousand passages the scorn which Professor Saintsbury has recently heaped on it.  But I protest against the injustice of treating the two Revisions—­of the New Testament and of the Old—­as a single work, and saddling the whole with the sins of a part.  For two years I spent half-an-hour daily in reading the Authorised and Revised Versions side by side, marking as I went, and in this way worked through the whole—­Old Testament, Apocrypha, New Testament.  I came to it (as I have said) with some prejudice; but I closed the books on a conviction, which my notes sustain for me, that the Revisers of the Old Testament performed their task delicately, scrupulously, on the whole with great good judgment; that the critic does a wrong who brings them under his indiscriminate censure; that on the whole they have clarified the sense of the Authorised Version while respecting its consecrated rhythms; and that—­to name an example, that you may test my words and judge for yourselves—­the solemn splendour of that most wonderful poem, the story of Job, [Greek:  dialampei], ’shines through’ the new translation as it never shone through the old.