century when the Authorized Version was issued.  One case in point is Mark vi. 22, in which Salome asks that the head of John the Baptist be given her “by and by in a charger.”  In 1611 the expression by and by meant immediately or forthwith, and was a correct translation, while with us it means a somewhat indefinite future and is therefore an incorrect translation.  With the noun, too, the meaning has changed.  Our idea of a charger is of a war-horse, not of a dish, which the original conveys.  A second reason for the revision was that there were in the libraries in this century several manuscripts of the original, much older than those to which the translators of the Authorized Version had access when they undertook their work.  A third reason was that a notable advance had been made in scholarship in the interval, and learned men were much better acquainted with the Hebrew and Greek idiom than were any of the scholars of the King James period.  For these three, among other reasons, a revision was necessary, that the unlearned reader might have, as nearly as was possible, the exact equivalent in English of the words of the Bible writers.  The project, after being widely discussed for several years, finally took shape in England in 1870, when the Convocation of Canterbury appointed two committees to undertake the work.  The ablest scholars in Hebrew and Greek literature in the country were assigned to the committees, of which one was engaged on the Old, and the other on the New Testament.  They were empowered to call to their aid similar committees in America, who might work simultaneously with them.  Stringent instructions were given to them to avoid making changes where they were not clearly needed for the accuracy of translation, and to preserve the idiom of the Authorized Version.  Only with these safeguards and with not a little reluctance, the commission was issued.  One hundred and one scholars on both sides of the Atlantic took part in the work.  The committees commenced their labors early in 1871.  On May 17, 1881, the Revised New Testament was issued, and on May 21, 1885, the Revised Old Testament was in the hands of the public.  All that scholarship, strenuous labor and exhaustive research could do to give a faithful translation had been done within the somewhat narrow and conservative limits under which the revisers were commissioned.

BIBLES BY THE MILLION.

With this improvement, there was at the same time a marked impetus in Bible circulation.  The nineteenth century has been eminently a Bible-reading and a Bible-studying period.  In no previous century have efforts on so gigantic a scale been made to put the Book in the hands of every one who could read it.  The price was brought so low by the decrease in the cost of production, that the very poorest could possess a copy.  The British and Foreign Bible Society, founded in 1804, and the American Bible Society, founded in