of God, and then burned his body.  At the stake he cried:  “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes!” Upon Tyndale’s version of the Bible the King James translation is solidly based.  “It is astonishing,” says Dr. Geddes, a profound scholar, “how little obsolete the language of it is, even at this day; and, in point of perspicuity and noble simplicity, propriety of idiom, and purity of style, no English version has yet surpassed it.”  Of course our language has changed greatly in 400 years.  Yet

THE LORD’S PRAYER

does not contain, in Tyndale’s exact language, one unrecognizable word.  It ran as follows:  “Oure Father which arte in heven, halowed be thy name.  Let thy kingdom come.  Thy wyll be fulfilled, as well in erth, as hit ys in heven.  Geve vs this daye oure dayly breade.  And forgeve vs oure treaspases, even as we forgeve them which treaspas vs.  Leede vs not into temptacion, but delyvre vs from yvell.  Amen.”

THE MARKED POETICAL SUPERIORITY

of the Protestant over the Catholic Bible may be shown in the twenty-third Psalm, and elsewhere.  The first says:  “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want;” the second:  “The Lord ruleth me; and I shall want nothing.”  The first says:  “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters; he restoreth my soul;” the second:  “He hath set me in a place of pasture; he hath brought me up on the water of refreshment; he hath converted my soul” (thus completely losing the original metaphor of the shepherd).  The first says:  “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil;” the second:  “For though I should walk in the midst of the shadow of death, I will fear no evils.”  In Job v. 7, the first says:  “Yet man is born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward;” the second:  “Man is born to labor, and the bird to fly.”  In Job xiv. 1, the first says:  “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble;” the second:  “Man born of a woman, living for a short time, is filled with many miseries.”  These examples will suffice to show the differences which pervade the two translations.

“INTENSE STUDY OF THE BIBLE

will keep any one from being vulgar in point of style,” says Coleridge.  “There are no songs,” says Milton, “comparable to the songs of Zion, no orations equal to those of the prophets, and no politics like those which the scriptures teach.”  “The pure and noble, the graceful and dignified simplicity of language,” says Pope, “is nowhere in such perfection as in the Scriptures.  The whole book of Job, with regard both to sublimity of thought and morality, exceeds, beyond all comparison, the most noble parts of Homer.”  “I use the Scriptures,” says Boyle, “not as an arsenal to be resorted to only for arms and weapons, but as