entered at Stationers' Hall, as was usual, so that no one knows in what month it appeared. Presumably, two printing-houses were engaged upon the work, for the different errors of the press can be accounted for in no other way. A large edition some say as many as twenty thousand copies - was printed; if so, what has become of them? The answer is simple: a large book, if it be much handled, almost invariably loses the first leaf or the last leaf, or both. The first issue of the Bible went into few great houses, but chiefly into parish churches, where it was accessible to all, with the result that it was thumbed, not out of existence so much as out of condition. One can follow in one's imagination the decline and fall of a Bible on a reading-desk in a country church. With the passage of years the pages become loose and finally detached from the volume, but they are carefully kept, and as often as they fall to the floor they are replaced. Finally they disappear; but plenty is left who reads a title-page, anyway? And after the volume has continued to shed its first and last leaves for a century or two the old Bible is discarded, and a newer and more easily read edition substituted. This may be as good a place as any for me to refer to the Bibles printed in America, prefacing my remarks by stating that the first Bible printed in what is now the United States was the so-called Eliot Bible, with an unpronounceable title, published for the use of the Indians. This was printed in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1661. A Bible in German was printed by Christopher Sauer at Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1743. The mother country never permitted her colonies to print a Bible in English: every copy had to be imported from England, although a profitable business was done in smuggling Bibles printed in English from the Continent especially from Holland — into this country. During the Revolutionary War, Bibles, like many other things, were scarce. At the end of that war Robert Aitken, a Scotsman who had come to this country some fifteen years before and established himself in Philadelphia as a bookseller, publisher, and binder, determined it was time to print a Bible in English. The matter was laid before Congress, then sitting, and after some discussion the following resolution was adopted: Resolved; That the United States in Congress assembled highly approve the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Robert Aitken, as subservient to the interest of religion, as well as an instance of the progress of arts in this country, and being satisfied of his care and accuracy in the execution of the work, they recommend this edition of the Bible to the inhabitants of the United States, and hereby authorize him to publish this Recommendation in the manner he shall think proper. Thereupon Mr. Aitken went to work, and in due course printed a small volume the page measures six by three and a half inches - which bore upon its title-page the coat of arms of the State of Pennsylvania. It was suggested that every soldier upon |