The celebration of the Tercentenary of the Authorised Version of the English Bible of 1611 has called into existence the little book here presented to the reader's notice. It is the brief repetition of a story beginning in 670 A.D. and reaching on for twelve hundred years to 1870. It takes us back to the Monastery of Whitby where Caedmon the monk paraphrased Scripture story in Saxon song, and brings us through the centuries to the Abbey of Westminster where a distinguished body of English scholars met in 1870 and commenced that Revision of the Scriptures which first saw the light in 1881. The History of the English Bible, like the Records of Bunyan's House Beautiful, is "the history of many famous things, as of things both Ancient and Modern." It is a tale of devoted service rendered often by men in loneliness and exile; of faithfulness even to martyrdom and death on the part of those who counted not their lives dear unto them, if only they could serve the great cause of spiritual enlightenment; it tells of great gifts of mind and great attainments in scholarship consecrated to the sacred cause of truth and the elevation of mankind. It will be found that our Greatest Book has a great history of its own, apart from the nature of its contents. It is not too much to say that to the men who have rendered such high service to the English-speaking people here at home and in our wide-spread Empire abroad, we owe it that their memory shall not perish, or their names be forgotten.
J. B.
Hampstead
11 March 1911