le where the critters
can't get at it and throw the first book agent down stairs head
first that tries to shove off on to us one of these new-fangled,
go-as-you-please Bibles, with all the modern improvements, and hell left
out.

Now, where was there a popular demand to have hell left out of the Bible?
Were there any petitions from the people sent up to this self-constituted
legislature of pinchbeck ministers, praying to have hell abolished, and
"hades" inserted? Not a petition. And what is this hades? Where is it?
Nobody knows. They have taken away our orthodox hell, that has stood by us
since we first went to Sunday school, and given us a hades. Half of us
wouldn't know a hades if we should see it dead in the road, but they
couldn't fool us any on hell.

No, these revisers have done more harm to religion than they could have
done by preaching all their lives. They have opened the ball, and now,
every time a second-class dominie gets out of a job, he is going to cut
and slash into the Bible. He will think up lots of things that will sound
better than some things that are in there, and by and by we shall have our
Bibles as we do our almanacs, annually, with weather probabilities on the
margins.

This is all wrong. Infidels will laugh at us, and say our old Bible is
worn out, and out of style, and tell us to have our measure taken for a
new one every fall and spring, as we do for our clothes. If this revision
is a good thing, why won't another one be better? The woods are full of
preachers who think they could go to work and improve the Bible, and if we
don't shut down on this thing, they will take a hand in it. If a man hauls
down the American flag, we shoot him on the spot; and now we suggest that
if any man mutilates the Bible, we run an umbrella into him and spread it.

The old Bible just filled the bill, and we hope every new one that is
printed will lay on the shelves and get sour. This revision of the Bible
is believed to be the work of an incendiary. It is a scheme got
up by British book publishers to make money out of pious people. It is on
the same principle that speculators get up a corner on pork or wheat. They
got revision, and printed Bibles enough to supply the world, and would not
let out one for love or money. None were genuine unless the name of this
British firm was blown in the bottle.

Millions of Bibles were shipped to this country by the firm that was
"long" on Bibles, and they were to be thro