resy in this country? It lives on the ear, like a music
that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells, which the
convert hardly knows how he can forgo. Its felicities often seem to be
almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind,
and the anchor of national seriousness.... The memory of the dead passes
into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its
verses. The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden
beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments, and
all that there has been about him of soft and gentle and pure and
penitent and good speaks to him for ever out of his English Bible.... It
is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and controversy never
soiled. In the length and breadth of the land there is not a Protestant
with one spark of religiousness about him, whose spiritual biography is
not in his Saxon Bible"{33}.

{Sidenote: _The Rhemish Bible_}

Such are his touching words; and certainly one has only to compare this
version of ours with the Rhemish, and the transcendent excellence of our
own reveals itself at once. I am not extolling now its superior
scholarship; its greater freedom from by-ends; as little would I urge
the fact that one translation is from the original Greek, the other from
the Latin Vulgate, and thus the translation of a translation, often
reproducing the mistakes of that translation; but, putting aside all
considerations such as these, I speak only here of the superiority of
the diction in which the meaning, be it correct or incorrect, is
conveyed to English readers. Thus I open the Rhemish version at
Galatians v. 19, where the long list of the "works of the flesh", and of
the "fruit of the Spirit", is given. But what could a mere English
reader make of words such as these--'impudicity', 'ebrieties',
'comessations', 'longanimity', all which occur in that passage? while
our Version for 'ebrieties' has 'drunkenness', for 'comessations' has
'revellings', and so also for 'longanimity' 'longsuffering'. Or set over
against one another such phrases as these,--in the Rhemish, "the
exemplars of the celestials" (Heb. ix. 23), but in ours, "the patterns
of things in the heavens". Or suppose if, instead of the words _we_ read
at Heb. xiii. 16, namely "To do good and to communicate forget not; for
with such sacrifices God is well pleased", we read as follows, which are
the words of the Rhemish, "Beneficence an