ART. V. The Annotated Paragraph Bible; containing the Old and New Testaments according to the Authorized Version, arranged in Paragraphs, with Explanatory Notes, &c. Published by the Religious Tract Society. London: 1853. 2. The English Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments, according to the Authorized Version, newly divided into Paragraphs. London: 1853.

Ir is, we believe, universally agreed among Protestants of all denominations, that the Bible is their one, great, paramount religious authority; that they repudiate all traditionary lore or human teaching; and that every man, depending on his own judgment, and availing himself of his right to use it, looks to the Sacred Scriptures, and the Sacred Scriptures alone, for the spiritual light which should inform his faith and direct his conduct. Such is the theory; but it is little more than a theory. If Christians acted upon it, honestly and more freely than they do, they would in all probability find their differences diminish and their charity increase. But the fact is, that the right of private judgment in religion is a principle more vaunted than exercised. And the experience of society would lead us to infer, that, while we and the rest of our fellow Protestants profess to follow the instructions of the Bible, we are far more generally led by the opinions of our respective ministers; and that our doctrinal views are never so much really derived from the letter of the Sacred Text, as from the notes of some favourite expositor in the margin. This, perhaps, is no more than might be naturally expected. It is the consequence either of an intellectual indolence, which would evade the task of elaborating the truth for itself; or of a praiseworthy humility, which feels its powers incompetent to the task; or of a certain timidity of conscience, which, shrinking from the peril of incurring error in so momentous a subject, would fain rest the responsibility of decision on another's judgment. But whatever influences may interfere to warp its operation, all Protestants, whether Churchmen or Dissenters, are agreed in the principle, that our only authoritative religious teacher is the Bible; and that as there is no truth nor doctrine necessary to our justification and everlasting salvation, but which is, or may be, drawn out of that fountain and well of truth; therefore, as many as be desirous to I enter into the right and perfect way unto God, must apply their minds to know Holy Scripture, without the which they

can neither sufficiently know God and His will, neither their 'office and duty.'*

Since the Bible then is of such inestimable value the depository of all religious and moral truth- the sacred ark in which the history and the subject matter of the Creator's communications to His creatures are preserved, we might very reasonably have presumed, that it would be regarded with a reverence correspondent to its importance, and that, in the copies of it disseminated among the people, every care would be taken not only to render the translation an exact reflection of the sense of the original, but to place the work before them in such a convenient form, as might induce them to read it, and accompanied by such useful typographical aids, as might facilitate their understanding what they read. It might have been fairly expected, that, in publishing a work which is of such momentous consequence to us all both here and hereafter, the text would have been carefully divided into paragraphs according to the sense; that what was spoken would have been placed between inverted commas; and that all passages, taken by one sacred writer from another, would either have been printed in italics, or in some easily intelligible manner distinguished as a quotation. It would have been no more than reasonable to assume, that among a Protestant people, -setting the high value upon them which we do,-esteeming them as our sole authority in religion, the Sacred Scriptures would have been published with at least as much consideration for the reader's convenience as the writings of our popular poets and novelists; and that there would be editions, not only of every variety of size and type, which might prove attractive to the taste of the wealthy, or be adapted to the limited means of the poor, but which might be demanded by the infirmities of our aged and suffering brother Christians. But the very reverse of this is the case. There is no other class of works, whether we regard the size, the type, or the distribution of the letterpress, in which we find that so little has been done to assist the reader, and so much to perplex him, as in the Sacred Scriptures. If it had been the object to multiply their difficulties, to prejudice their meaning, and to deter men from the perusal of them; we doubt whether the most accomplished Jesuit could have devised any more effectual mode of publication than that which has been generally adopted, and almost universally prevails. No works of inferior value could have maintained their ground against the treatment they have encountered. We are

* Homily on Reading the Holy Scriptures. Part I.

not ignorant of the several editions of the Bible which exist; and we fearlessly declare, that we have never yet met with any copy of the Bible, which we could take up and read with typographical satisfactions. There are dear Bibles and cheap Bibles: there are Bibles so large that your hand can with difficulty raise them; and there are Bibles so small that they can be carried about in your pocket: there are Bibles of which the paper is as glossy as satin and as thick as paste-board; and there are Bibles, of which the paper is so dark that the printing is hardly discernible, and so thin that the leaves crumple up beneath your finger in turning the pages: but, nevertheless, among all those innumerable and variously diversified editions, no Bible has been hitherto produced which can be read with as much ease and comfort as any ordinary book. There is no such thing as a readable Bible.

This great evil in one respect results from a sort of superstitious notion that the Sacred Scriptures must be all brought together into a single volume. But why? Superstition cannot condescend to answer our inquiries, and we are incapable of finding any intelligible solution for them ourselves. Such a collective form of publication may be useful for the purpose of reference; and to the clergyman, in the composition of his sermons, it may be a desirable thing to have the whole body of works, from which his proofs and his illustrations are to be drawn, thus lying ready to his hand, compendiously before him. But for the laity-the great body of Christian people-such an arrangement is as unnecessary as it is cumbersome. We have all taught ourselves to look upon the Bible as a single religious book; but it is, in fact, a library of religious books. It consists of works composed by different authors, treating of different subjects, and written at widely different times: and it is only one book, inasmuch as these works are all bound up together in one binding. On ordinary occasions, there are no two of the productions thus compressed between the same boards, that we are likely to want at the same moment. And if a man would fain take his evening walk into the fields with the Prophecies of Isaiah as his companion, it is no light grievance to him, that he must either forego his inclination, or carry along with him at the same time the Law of Moses and the History of the Jews; the Psalms of David and the Proverbs of Solomon; the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles; the Epistles and the Apocalypse. The probability is, that the sight of the encumbrance will be sufficient to counteract his purpose, and direct his attention to some other and far inferior author. This principle of having all the compositions of all the sacred writers collected together in

the same volume, has induced the practice of printing our Bibles in double columns; because it is the form by which the greatest number of words can be squeezed into one page. But, notwithstanding this offensive mode of distributing the text, which is puzzling to the sight, by which the attention is disturbed, and which is only adopted in the cheapest and most inferior editions of other works, the book is so big and heavy, when the type is large enough to be easily read, that no hand of moderate strength can hold it; or, when the book is of a moderate weight and dimensions, the type is so minute as to be only legible by eyes of youthful strength and microscopic power. In the

Annotated Paragraph Bible,' of which the title stands at the head of this article, the double column, with some other disadvantages that obtain in the ordinary editions of the English Scriptures, have been got rid of. That is no inconsiderable gain. But the determination to compress the works of all the inspired authors into a single volume, has brought its inseparable mischiefs along with it; an unwieldy book, a small, sharp, dazzling character, and a length of line which it is very difficult to follow.

But this pernicious system of compression is not, by any means, the most grievous injury to which the sacred text has been subjected by editors and printers. This is a slight evil in comparison with the mischief which has been inflicted on the sense of the inspired writings by the mode of breaking them up into chapter and verse which has been uniformly adopted. These divisions, which have no existence in the original, have been made without any authority whatever. They were introduced for the purpose of liberating the theological student from the necessity of attaining a deep and accurate knowledge of the Scriptures, by placing in his hands a Concordance, which they have been notched and scored to tally with, and by which he may be readily assisted to the discovery of any passage he may chance to want. About the middle of the thirteenth century, Cardinal Hugo de Santo Caro projected a Concordance to the Latin Vulgate, and divided the Old and New Testament into chapters. Rabbi Nathan, in the fifteenth century, in preparing a Concordance of the Hebrew Scriptures, subdivided the chapters into verses. Robert Stephens, in the sixteenth century, passed simultaneously through the press a New Testament and a Concordance; and, so at least his son Henry tells us, while travelling on horseback between Lyons and Paris, he cut the New Testament into verses for the sake of adapting it to his Concordance. This, we believe, is in brief

See Horne's Introduction to the Holy Scriptures,' vol. ii. pp. 155-158. Second edition.

the most approved account of the origin of those divisions and subdivisions by which our editions of the Bible are disfigured. No other book ever suffered such irreverend treatment. In all other compositions, the paragraph ends where the sense pauses; in the Sacred Scriptures, whatever the sense may be, every third or fourth line brings the reader to the end of the paragraph. They are the only works we happen to be acquainted with, in which the correct arrangement of the author's text has been rendered subordinate to the facility of reference. And we are quite sure, that they alone are endowed with a sufficient force of vitality to outlive so cruel a process of mutilation.

An attempt has been made in an edition of the Authorized Version, published by Mr. Blackader, to introduce a more perspicuous and correct division of the Holy Scriptures into sections and paragraphs, but this publication, is inferior in typographical elegance, and in its annotations, to the Paragraph Bible of the Tract Society. The fact is chiefly remarkable as a further proof that the demand for Bibles printed in an improved form is felt by the public, and will doubtless be provided for by the booksellers.

The practice of breaking the text of Scripture into verses would, under any circumstances, prove most injurious to the right apprehension of its meaning. It is the immediate cause of much misconception. Passages of Holy Writ, thus insulated, receive a kind of independent character. The sense of each little paragraph seems drawn to a point; and the careless or unlettered reader is apt to confine his attention to the few words thus placed in an aphoristic form before him, and to accept them as a distinct enunciation of some religious dogma; whereas, if they had been presented to his eye in connexion with their context, he would at once have received them in their right meaning, and been spared the error into which the present deceptive mode of printing the volume has betrayed him. We cannot conceive any case, in which evil would not have resulted from the introduction of our divisions of Chapter and Verse. With whatever care the Sacred Text had been cut into such minute sections, those minute sections must necessarily have had a tendency to mislead the reader. But they have not been carefully made. The only end contemplated in making them was, to fit the Bible to the Concordance. And that it might be effectually accomplished, every other consideration-the progress of the narrative the beauty of the poetry - the theological argument and even the grammatical construction of the sentences, have been continually disregarded. We need not enlarge on the detriment which the eloquence, the pathos,