not live to carry out. In response therefore to numerous requests to make these articles available for reference, the Trustees have decided to include them in this volume; and it only remains for them to express their sincere regret that it has thus become necessary to perpetuate them in a form which their author never intended to be more than temporary. May 25, 1891. A FRESH REVISION OF THE ENGLISH NEW TESTAMENT. M I. ORE than two centuries had elapsed since the first Latin Version of the Scriptures was made, when the variations and errors of the Latin Bible began to attract the attention of students and to call for revision. It happened providentially, that at the very moment when the need was felt, the right man was forthcoming. In the first fifteen centuries of her existence the Western Church produced no Biblical scholar who could compare with S. Jerome in competence for so great a task. At the suggestion of his ecclesiastical superior, Damasus bishop of Rome, he undertook this work, for which many years of selfdenying labour had eminently fitted him. L. R. I It is no part of my design to give a detailed account of this undertaking. I wish only to remark. that when Jerome applied himself to his task, he foresaw that he should expose himself to violent attacks, and that this anticipation was not disappointed by the result. 'Who,' he asks in his preface to the Gospels, the first portion of the work which he completed, 'Who, whether learned or unlearned, when he takes up the volume, and finds that what he reads differs from the flavour he has once tasted, will not immediately raise his voice and pronounce me guilty of forgery and sacrilege, for daring to add, to change, to correct anything in the ancient books'?' 2 Again and again he defends himself against his antagonists. His temper, naturally irritable, was provoked beyond measure by these undeserved attacks, and betrayed him into language which I shall not attempt to defend. Thus writing to Marcella he mentions certain 'poor creatures (homunculos) who studiously calumniate him for attempting to correct some passages in the Gospels against the authority of the ancients and the opinion of the whole world.' 'I could afford to despise them,' he says, 'if I stood upon my rights, for a lyre is played in vain to an ass.' 'If they do not like the water from the 1 Op. x. 660 (ed. Vallarsi). Epist. 28 (1. p. 133). |