The Rhemish Bible, like that of Wycliffe, is professedly based upon the Vulgate. The New Testament appeared at Rheims in 1582, and the Old Testament at Douay in 1609. The importance of this translation in connexion with the history of the so-called Authorised Version of the English Bible consists chiefly in the facts that it contains a large number of the Latin words which were adopted by King James's revisers, and that much of the influence of the Vulgate upon their revision of 1611 must be traced to the Rhemish Bible. It is deserving of notice that the Rhemish translators made no mention of their obligations to the earlier English translations, which formed the basis of their own version.

The general outlines of the history of the revision which was undertaken shortly after the accession of King James I. are so familiar to English readers that we may dismiss this portion of our subject in few words. The Royal Commission under which this revision was undertaken was issued in 1604. The revisers were divided into six companies, of which two met at Westminster, two at Oxford, and two at Cambridge. The manner in which the selection of the revisers was made is not known, but it is probable that they were nominated by the two Universities and approved by the King. Only forty-seven of the fifty-four names to which reference is made by the King in a letter addressed by him to Bishop Bancroft, appear upon the lists of the respective companies. Amongst these are found the names of the following well-known scholars, viz., Bishops Andrewes and Overall; Savile, Provost of Eton; Reynolds, President of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; Saravia, Canon of Canterbury; Lively, Professor of Hebrew at Cambridge; and Bedwell and Boys, both of whom were distinguished for their Oriental learning. The instructions to the two companies of revisers, which are supposed to have been drawn up by King James himself, were judicious, scholarlike, and liberal. Although the Royal Commission was issued in 1604, and the work did not appear until 1611, the time actually occupied in its execution appears from the preface to have been somewhat short of three years, or, as Dr. Miles Smith somewhat fancifully computes it (in allusion to the fabulous account of the composition of the Septuagint), twice seven times seventy-two days and more.' The whole of the work was divided into six portions, and distributed amongst the six companies in such a manner that the Westminster Company had the early portion of the Old Testament and the latter half of the New Testament, the Oxford Company the latter portion of the Old Testa

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ment and the Four Gospels and Acts, and the Cambridge Company the middle portion of the Old Testament and the Apocrypha. When a revision was completed at the different centres, two members were selected from each company to superintend the final preparation of the work for the press in London. About nine months appear to have been occupied in this preparation, and the work itself appeared from the press of Robert Barker in 1611, in the form of a well-printed, but unwieldy, folio volume. It is stated upon the title-page that this new translation or revision-for the book is said to be newly translated out of the original 'tongues,' as well as diligently compared with the former 'translations and revised'-is appointed to be read in churches. It is difficult to understand the meaning of these words, inasmuch as no evidence has hitherto been adduced in proof that this version received any authoritative sanction from Convocation or Parliament, or from the Privy Council or the King. Nor does the so-called Authorised Version appear to have practically superseded the Genevan version for a space of many years. Thus we find that Bishop Andrewes, when preaching before King James at Whitehall, takes his text for the most part from the Genevan Bible many years after the publication of that version which had been executed, as we have seen, in virtue of a Royal Commission issued by King James, of which Bishop Andrewes was himself one of the most distinguished members. We may observe further that, although no complete edition of the Bishops' Bible was printed after the year 1611, the Genevan Bible continued to be published both in London and in Amsterdam; and there can be no doubt that it was extensively used, at least in private, for many years after the publication of the so-called Authorised Version. By the middle of the seventeenth century, however, the pre-eminent merits of the last revision, embodying, as it did, the results of the labours of the best English and Continental scholars during the century which preceded its publication, were almost universally acknowledged; and from that time the revision of 1611 has been regarded as the acknowledged standard of faith and practice by the English-speaking nations throughout the world.

We may not pause to dwell upon the abortive attempts which were made during the Commonwealth for a new trans'lation of the Bible out of the original tongues,' or upon the numerous amended' versions of the whole or parts of the Sacred Scriptures which have appeared at various intervals during the last two hundred and fifty years, which, for the

most part, have failed to secure any extensive circulation or to leave behind them any permanent results. Much has undoubtedly been done during that period in the way of prepara tion for the work which has been reserved for our own time. As regards the text of the Old Testament, the chief practical value of the unwearied labours of Kennicott and De Rossi has been to confirm the conclusions at which our ablest scholars had already arrived in respect to the general fidelity of the commonly received, i.e. the Masoretic text; and this conclusion, we are now enabled to state, will be yet further corroborated by the publication of the arduous and important work of Dr. Ginsburg, embodying the results of labours extending over many years, of which the first instalment has already appeared. As regards the text of the New Testament, with which we are more directly concerned in the present article, the Revisers of 1881 are placed in a position altogether different from that of their predecessors in the seventeenth century. At the time when the Commission of King James I. was issued in 1604, not only was the science of textual criticism in its infancy, if indeed it could be said to have come into existence, but, as regards the New Testament, the materials upon which it was to work had not as yet been brought to light. The manuscripts of the New Testament are, as it is well known, divided into two classes, the Uncial manuscripts, i.e. those which are written in Greek capitals, and the Cursives, which are written in small characters, corresponding more nearly with the mode of writing now commonly adopted. The line of demarcation between these two classes of manuscripts may be assigned, with a sufficient degree of accuracy, to the tenth century. The number of uncial manuscripts hitherto discovered, to which a date anterior to the tenth century may be assigned, is under 150, and that of cursive manuscripts, dating from the tenth to the fifteenth century, is under 1,500. It will be found upon examination, as Bishop Ellicott has pointed out, that the English revision of A.D. 1611 was based upon the text of Beza's Greek Testament of 1582, and upon that of Stephens's Greek Testament of 1550, which differ so little from each other that they may be regarded for all practical purposes as one and the same edition. Now it appears that both of these editors had a certain amount of critical materials at their disposal, but that neither made much use of them. Beza possessed the celebrated manuscript which bears his name, the Codex Beza, containing the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, and also the Claromontane Manuscript containing the Epistles. Stephens, in his first edition, made use of

certain MSS. which were found in the Royal Library at Paris, and he published in his third edition a list of some 2,200 various readings from different MSS., one of which was the Codex Beza. Notwithstanding, however, the fact that these materials were not only within his reach, but had been partially employed by him, he nevertheless, in his third edition, made but little use of them, and adopted for the most part the fourth edition of the text of Erasmus, which was published in the year 1516. This edition was brought out by Erasmus in great haste with the view of anticipating, as it did, the publication of the Complutensian New Testament of Cardinal Ximenes. The consequence of this precipitancy was that although there was one, amongst the MSS. that Erasmus used which is of the highest critical value, and although he might even have obtained through his friend Paulus Bombasius a transcript, or at least a collation, of the Vatican Manuscript itself, he made but little use of either. He rejected, we are told, the readings of the former because they were so different from the other MSS. which he consulted; and, as regards the latter, he appears to have contented himself with referring to it in regard of the three witnesses' of 1 John v. 7, and obtaining a transcript of a portion of the same chapter. It appears further that the single MS. of the Apocalypse which Erasmus used was so defective that he was constrained to produce a text by retranslation of the Vulgate into his own Greek. Some corrections were introduced into the fourth edition of this work, which is virtually that upon which the Authorised Version of 1611 is founded. Notwithstanding these corrections it has been alleged, and apparently upon good authority, that there are words in the two editions of the Greek Testament from which the English version of 1611 was made, having no manuscript authority whatever: these were inserted as the Greek equivalents of a Latin version, certainly no accurate representation of the original Greek, of which Erasmus possessed only a corrupt text. We cannot undertake even a cursory description of the materials for the formation of a critical text of the New Testament which are now available, and we must content ourselves with referring those of our readers who desire to form a just estimate of their extent and value to Bishop Ellicott's valuable work on the revision of the English New Testament. It must suffice us to observe that of the two oldest MSS., the Vatican and the Sinaitic, both of which are assigned by the most competent judges to the fourth century, the former contains nearly the whole, and the latter the whole, of the New Testament; and

that in addition to the numerous MSS., both uncial and cursive, of later dates, we have three MSS. of nearly as early a date as the two already named, viz., the nearly complete Alexandrian MS. which was presented to King Charles I. by Cyril, the Patriarch of Alexandria; the fragmentary rescript which bears the name Codex Ephremi (the original writing having been in great measure erased to allow of a work of Ephrem the Syrian being written upon the same parchment), both probably of the fifth century; and for the Gospels and Acts the valuable Codex Beza, which is assigned to about the middle of the sixth century. For St. Paul's Epistles we have, in addition to the Vatican, Sinaitic, and Alexandrian MSS., not only the Codex Ephremi, but also the very important Claromontane and Augiensian MSS.; for the Catholic Epistles the four oldest MSS.; and for the Apocalypse, in addition to the Sinaitic MS. and the Codex Ephremi, a valuable MS. of the eighth century which is now in the Vatican library.

But it is not only in regard to the possession of the materials on which a trustworthy text may be based that the Revisers of 1881 occupy a position widely different from that of their predecessors in 1611. The collation of ancient MSS., dispersed amongst the various public libraries of Europe, is a work involving no inconsiderable amount of time and labour, even on the part of those who have acquired by long practice the art of deciphering those MSS. with comparative facility. And hence it is a boon of inestimable value to the Biblical student of the present day, that instead of being constrained to undertake this expenditure of time and labour himself or to trust to the results of collations made at his request by others who may not be equally competent for the task, he has the results of such collations, as regards eight of the most important MSS., in so accessible a form that he is able, as Bishop Ellicott observes, to read and study the text of 'each in its sequence and connexion, and so to form a more 'trustworthy judgment of the peculiar character of the indivi'dual document.' In addition, moreover, to the facilities thus afforded of examining the principal uncial manuscripts, the Biblical scholar of the present time is enabled, in virtue of the labours not only of Dr. Tischendorf and other continental critics, but of Dr. Tregelles, Mr. Scrivener, and other English scholars, to arrive at a much more accurate knowledge of all the leading cursive manuscripts, and to assign to them their proper degree of importance in the determination of the text.

In like manner as regards the ancient versions of Holy Scripture, although much remains to be done in this depart