We have received the annual Report of the British and
Foreign Bible Society. (146 Queen Victoria Street, E.C. La) We have no wish to depreciate the work of the Society, carried out, as it is, with admirable activity. The sale is pushed with the utmost energy, and for all that the Society has been at work for more than a hundred years, there is still plenty of room for its exer- tions. Imagine Christian people so ignorant that when shown a New Testament the remark made was : "New Testament! We will keep to the old." This was in the district of Cologne and Aachen. We see that the Society does not refuse to circulate the Douai Version. Is it not strange that among the millions of volumes annually produced and circulated there is not, as far as we can gather from the lists, a simple complete " Bible" ? We do not see the Apocrypha mentioned, and every one knows that the so-called Bible in ordinary circulation is without it. Yet every loyal member of the Church of England is under obligation to read portions from it between twenty and thirty days in the year. With what force can we complain if Romanising clergy bring in alien books of devotion, &c., when we are guilty of so gross a neglect ? As for the intrinsic value, who can compare Esther and Ecclesiastes with Ecclesiosticus?
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