ing of
the many ambiguities and obscurities which long familiarity with the
Prayer Book Version has led him to pass over without any particular
notice. The revision of the Prayer Book Version has been long felt to be
a very real necessity. To read and to hear read in the daily services of
the Church what, in parts, cannot be understood can never be spiritually
good for reader or hearer. And yet, such is the really devout
conservatism of the bulk of our congregations, that though a careful
revision, sympathetically executed, has been strongly urged by some of
our most earnest scholars and divines, it is more than doubtful whether
such a revision ever will be carried out. If this be so, it only remains
for us so to encourage, in our schools and in our Bible classes, the
efficient explanatory help of the Revised Version. If this is steadily
done, nearly all that is at present obscure or unintelligible in the
Prayer Book Version will no longer remain so to the greater part of our
worshippers.

Of the remaining Poetical Books the revision of the Authorised Version of
the Song of Solomon must be specially noticed. In the common version the
dramatic element is almost entirely lost, the paragraphs are imperfectly
noted, and obscurities not a few the inevitable consequence. In a large
degree these serious imperfections are removed, and the whole tenor of
this exquisite poem made clear to the general reader. The margin will
show the great care bestowed on the poem by the Revisers; and the fewness
and trifling nature of the changes maintained by the American Company
will also show, in a confessedly difficult Book, the somewhat remarkable
amount of the agreement between the two Companies. On the Prophetical
Books I do not feel qualified to speak except in very general terms; and
for illustrations must refer the reader to the large list of the
corrected renderings, especially of the prophecy of Isaiah, in the useful
work of Dr. Chambers, who has devoted at least eleven pages to the
details of the Revisers' work on the Evangelist of the Old Covenant. The
impression which the consideration of these details leaves on the mind of
the reader will be, I am confident, the same as that which is I believe
felt by all professed Hebrew scholars who have examined the version, viz.
that it is not only faithful and thorough, but often rises to a very high
level of poetic utterance. Let any one read aloud in the Revised Version
the well