ecision--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.

* * * * *

And now Gentlemen (as George Herbert said on a famous occasion), let us
tune our instruments.

Before discussing with you another and highly important question of style
in writing, I will ask you to look back for a few moments on the road we
have travelled.

We have agreed that our writing should be _appropriate_: that it should
fit the occasion; that it should rise and fall with the subject, be grave
where that is serious, where it is light not afraid of what Stevenson in
"The Wrong Box" calls 'a little judicious levity.' If your writing
observe these precepts, it will be well-mannered writing.

To be sure, much in addition will depend on yourself--on what you are or
have made yourself, since in writing the style can never be separated
from the man. But neither can it in the practice of virtue: yet, though
men differ in character, I do not observe that moralists forbear from
laying down general rules of ex