ALL REVISIONS OF TYNDALE'S 59 So the good work of revision and translation went on in a fashion which makes it all the more remarkable that for nearly two centuries and three-quarters after 1611 no further revision was seriously attempted. The truth is that, so far as the English of the Authorized Version is concerned, these frequent revisions had made it such that no further revision on that score could have been seriously proposed; such had been the satisfactory result of the various revisions of the work done by Tyndale. Had it not been that valuable manuscripts and versions unknown or unavailable in the seventeenth century had come to light and had been so collated that scholars became increasingly able to arrive at a text far nearer the original than was possible three centuries ago, it is more than probable that the Authorized Version would not only still have been reigning among the English-speaking peoples, but would have been reigning without a rival. But as the revisers of 1611 themselves asked, 'To whom was it ever imputed for a failing (by such as were wise) to go over that which he had 'done, and to amend it where he saw cause?' Reverence for God's Word, loyalty to the eternal verities, and patient pressing on in the fullest light we have to Him who is the Light, all involve a readiness to revise whenever the need for revision really comes. 'Happy, and thrice happy, hath our English nation been, since God hath given learned translators to express in our mother tongue the heavenly mysteries of His Holy Word, delivered to His Church in the Hebrew and Greek languages; who although they have, in some matters of no importance unto salvation, as men been deceived; yet have they faithfully delivered the whole substance of the heavenly doctrine contained in the Holy Scriptures.'-DR. FULKE. CHAPTER VI THE BIBLE IN PRE-REFORMATION SCOTLAND URPRISE has been expressed, and naturally so, ever made to translate the Bible into the Scots dialect, which even as a literary medium was then different from English. For not only were religious strivings as keen in the northern kingdom as in the southern, and the Reformation more thoroughgoing when it came ; there was a great demand for English Bibles among the Scots whenever these were available. It makes the triumphs of the Bible in Scotland all the more remarkable, however, that it moved Scotsmen so mightily even when they read it in a dialect different from their own; and nowhere were its triumphs greater or more enduring. In spite of the constant feuds between Scotland and England during the Middle Ages, and the equally constant friendship between Scotland and France, there was at times a considerable amount of intellectual and religious intercourse between the neighbour kingdoms. In the year 1365, for example, when Wiclif's influence was at its greatest in Oxford, no fewer than eightyone students from Scotland were provided with safeconducts to enable them to go South to prosecute their studies at the University there. That meant that at the very time when Oxford was seething with Lollardy, Scotland was in closest touch with it; and that the teachings of the great thinker and reformer were brought to the North by those who had both the will and the power to commend them. For, naturally, it was the young and eager spirits of the time who came most under Wiclif's influence. Copies of his translation of the Scriptures seem also to have reached Scotland; and |