64. Revised Editions

This impression approaches as near as possible to what is called "an immaculate text," as only one erratum, and that very slight, has been detected in it. Among so many reprints of the Bible, and in so many different offices, it would have been a mass of miracles had not many inaccuracies crept in through error and oversight on the part of printers and correctors of the press. As this is a point on which every reader of the Bible must feel some anxiety, it may be well to make the following statement. A very able Committee of the American Bible Society, spent some three years in a diligent and laborious comparison of recent copies of the best edition of the American Bible Society, and of the four leading British editions, namely, those of London, Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh, and also of the original edition of 1611. The number of variations in the text and punctuation of these six copies was found to fall but little short of twenty-four thousand. A vast amount! Quite enough to frighten us, till we read the Committee's assurance, that "of all this great number, there is not one which mars the integrity of the text, or affects any doctrine or precept of the Bible." As this, however, is a point in which the minutest accuracy is to be sought, that Committee have prepared an edition wherein these variations are set right, to serve as a standard copy for the Society to print by in future.

Infinite is the debt of gratitude which the world owes to its Maker for the Bible. Scarcely less is its debt to his goodness, in raising up competent instruments for its translation into different tongues, unlocking its treasures to enrich the nations. This matter is finely touched by Dr. Field, a divine of the seventeenth century, in whose writings that great critic, S. T. Coleridge, was wont to take a deep and admiring delight. "That most excellent light of Christian wisdom, revealed in the sacred books of the Divine Oracles, is incomparable and peerless, and whereupon all others do depend; the bright beams of which heavenly light do show unto us the ready way to eternal happiness, amidst the sundry turnings and dangerous windings of this life. And lest either the strangeness of the languages wherein these Holy Books were written, or the deepness of the mysteries or the multiplicity of hidden senses contained in them, should any way hinder us from the clear view and perfect behold ing of the heavenly brightness; God hath called and assembled into his Church out of all the nations of the world, and out of all people that dwell under the arch of heaven, men abounding in all secular learning and knowledge, and filled with the understanding of holy things, which might turn these Scriptures and Books of God into the tongues of every nation; and might unseal this Book so fast clasped and sealed, and manifest and open the mysteries therein contained, not only by lively voice, but by writings to be carried down to all posterities.