Professor Levade wrote a long letter in reply, which, considering the age and circumstances of the writer, is one of the most affecting compositions I ever read. It would occupy several pages; but it is to the following effect: He expresses his deep affliction at what had occurred; calls God to witness his sincerity in the matter; explains how earnestly he had vindicated the Society's regulation about notes and comments, which had induced him for a considerable time to omit even the references to parallel passages, as these are a species of comment; but that his "four fellowlabourers confidently maintained, that explanatory notes were not prohibited; and that they were to be met with in the margin of the Bible-Society's own authorised Bibles." He adds, that he at length yielded; his colleagues incessantly urging, " that I only knew the letter, not the spirit, of this regulation; which tended to prevent controversies, to which commentaries might give rise." Still he was much harassed about the matter, and reproached himself that he had not written to Mr. Owen on the subject; but he adds: "I may say, in vindication of my friends, that they never thought they were violating the regulation; and they persisted to think that they understood it better than me.". The aged man goes on to lament his constitutional timidity of character which had prevented his acting more decisively, and in conclusion offers that, since all the blame rested on him alone, a public acknowledgment of his error should be published, both in the London and the Lausanne Reports, and tenders for himself the return of the sum of 250l.; adding, that the other four Swiss societies might be fairly held to the same re-imbursement. The venerable old man, after all his care and exertions, was bowed to the very dust with self-abasement and distress. I must give your lordship the conclusion of his letter.

"Command, direct, we are wrong; I have only to request that all the blame may fall upon myself; and that for reasons which you will understand; having had need of my associates, and their labours to assist in perfecting the work in hand.

"Could it have been expected that he,-who, as every body knows, at the age of seventy-four, consecrates nearly all his powers, his time, and no inconsiderable portion of money, to the promotion of Bible Societies; who delights in no reading except that which is connected with his labours; who, overburthened with employment, has lately requested and obtained leave of his government to resign his situation of a professor in the academy, and to divide his salary with an assistant, for the sole purpose of being wholly devoted to his adopted child, the Bible Society of the Canton de Vaud, his exclusive delight;-that he, who has made his home a warehouse of bound Bibles, which he sells, one by one, at different prices, every hour;that he, who is solely responsible for the correspondence, for the accounts of purchases and sales of 10,000 copies of the Bible, frequently with the packing and the care of binding them, of the writing out bills, and the receipts of money to be carried to the funds; who keeps the secretary's book, and who has the examination of all applications for grants, and is authorised to give or sell copies at one, two, three, four, or five shillings, according to circumstances,-could it have been believed that he could have given just cause of offence to that committee, who are his generous benefactors, and to whom he owes the purest enjoyments of his life?"

"I have written this letter in the bitterness of my soul; get your committee to excuse its disorder and lengthiness; but I cannot copy it. If I should obtain a sort of absolution by means of the conditions which I offer, I shall feel bold enough to go to England in July or August, to make the amende honorable for my faults before your committee.”

Such, my lord, is the history of this Lausanne accusation. I have gone into it at some length, as an exemplification of one of the charges urged against the British-and-Foreign Bible-Society. To reply to all the rest with the same detail, would swell this already thick pamphlet to a volume. It is easy to say, in four ominous words, "Witness the Lausanne Bible;" but four pages will not suffice to explain the whole of the circumstances, so as to elicit the truth thus grossly misrepresented. A poisoned dagger will in one moment inflict a wound, which it may require weeks or months to heal. I think Mr. Owen was not sufficiently vigilant; I think Professor Levade was timidly weak; I think that the revisors failed in some of their renderings, but not with any wish to pervert the

sacred text; I think the committee learned much wisdom by this transaction, which could only be acquired in the school of experience; and I think that God may have intended to teach his servants a painful lesson of humility but beyond this, I know not that I rise from the consideration with any feelings but those of shame and sorrow, that any person calling himself a Christian should have wrung from the above proceedings poison and wormwood to distress the hearts of the righteous, and to wound the Saviour in the house of his friends.

DANISH.

The next charge is respecting the revised version of the Danish Testament. Of the character of this version, personally, I know nothing; I never saw a copy of it, and could not have read it, if I had. I hear, indeed, that it is neologian, socinian, and blasphemous; but I have no evidence to prove it; for though several of my Sackville-street friends tell me" I may rely on it, that it is so," yet as they do not pretend to have collated it, or even to have seen it, and only echo one after the other the declamations of Mr. Haldane, or some other individual, I am not perfectly satisfied with the validity of the evidence. I know too well how freely such charges as the above have of late been scattered abroad, and by no person more freely than by Mr. Haldane; who, with a view to disparage the Bible Society, and not merely the Bible Society, but I might say every thing English, every thing that is not Scottish, and more especially the Church of England, her clergy, and her institutions, has not been parsimonious in his charges. My shelves already groan under the unreadable masses of that gentleman's party-spirited accusations; and, even while I am writing, two hundred and forty closely-printed heavy pages of similar "tromperie," with the wet date of 1832 upon them, are added to the number, and may serve as a specimen of the whole. When I find in this, as in all Mr. Haldane's writings, such men as Levade called not only" Arians, Socinians, Neologians," but absolutely "Infidels,” -the infidel Levade! when I see charges of nearly the same nature urged against truly orthodox and religious men of our own land; when I find the Rev. Daniel Wilson, for example, accused of exhibiting "the very worst part of the subtlety of the Neologians;" when I find that eminently pious young man so soon snatched from us to a world of peace, Mr. Greenfield, vehemently accused of having published notes, yea, "many notes on the Bible of " a Neologian and infidel character,"-infidel Mr. Greenfield!-when I find Mr. Haldane almost identifying "Neology and

Popery" with " Arminianism," and the " orthodox faith" with " pure

Calvinism," and "the doctrines of the Gospel" with his own peculiar views of "election and predestination," respecting which he considers" the Evangelical clergy" of England so unscripturally deficient as not fit to be teachers; when, moreover, I find the same system running throughout most of the recent publications against the Bible Society; when "neology and infidelity" have become household words, to stigmatize whatever these gentlemen happen to disapprove; when my excellent friend, Mr. Platt himself, has connected his quitting the Bible Society with the adoption of certain strange notions about prophecy and biblical interpretation, which lead him to charge in print the most eminent and pious men of all confessions since the days of Jerome, with " wild wanderings;" when even so humble an individual as myself has been gravely accused by some of the founders of the Trinitarian Society of" blasphemy," because in a pamphlet on the case of Miss Fancourt, which I dedicated to the Bishop of London, fifteen months ago, I entered a caveat against the notion of the revival of miracles generally, and in Miss Fancourt's case in particular;—when I consider these things, my lord, I am not convinced in respect to the Danish, or any other version, that it is " Neologian and Socinian," merely because

this lightly-weighed but heavy charge is vehemently reiterated by tens or hundreds of persons, who do not pretend ever to have seen a page of it, and only take their notions from Mr. Haldane's party assertions.

But be the version good or bad, I am not called to form any opinion upon it; for whatever may be its character, the Earl-street Society had no more to do with it than Mr. Haldane or myself. This has been so often stated in print, that I can only marvel that any man who speaks or writes upon the subject can contrive to forget it. In a pamphlet published in 1826, entitled, " Remarks upon the recent Accusations," from Mr. George Stokes, who had access to the necessary documents, and whose statement has never been attempted to be impeached, it is stated:

"Respecting the observations on the text of the Danish Testament printed in 1822, it is sufficient to state, that it was the sole concern of a Commission appointed by the Government, over which the Danish Bible-Society had no controul. Towards it the British and Foreign Society did NOT contribute."

To the same effect, Mr. Platt himself, in his " Facts" published in 1827, and re-published by his permission since his secession from the Society, stated,

"That Danish Testament was printed at Copenhagen; and the Committee of the Bible Society in London had no more control over it than the Editor of the Quarterly Review: it was printed by the Society at Copenhagen, altogether at their own expense, and according to their own directions. Supposing, therefore, that it has even been designedly corrupted, still the Committee in Earl-street had nothing whatever to do with it. So far from it indeed, that they haye lately ordered preparations to be made for a new edition of the Danish Bible to be printed from a copy of the old and standard Danish version, which has been forwarded to them for this purpose by their correspondents in Norway."

To all

This edition has since been completed, and is in circulation. which I am enabled to add, that not only the British-and-Foreign Bible-Society did not aid or abet the edition objected to, either before or during its publication, but that after it had been published it never purchased or circulated a single copy. Surely party spirit must go far indeed to manufacture a charge out of facts like these. The only possible control which the Earl-street Society could have over the version was to abstain from purchasing copies of it: and this it has done; and when for the benefit of Norway an edition was necessary, it selected the text of an older edition, not open to the same charges.

But again and again, my lord, it is necessary to repeat, What have all these matters to do with the point which they are brought to establish? The gentlemen who were determined to form a new Society to be managed by themselves, tell crowded assemblies of the iniquities of the Lausanne or Danish Scriptures, and then assure them that all this has happened on account of the Bible Society not being constructed upon Trinitarian principles. And people are expected to jump at this conclusion, without being favoured with any of the intermediate steps of the argument. But the conclusion is altogether fabricated and false; for I too must turn starling, and repeat, that no Socinian has ever been upon the committee of the Earl-street Society; the revisors of the Lausanne Bible professed to be members of a Trinitarian Protestant church; and their edition is certainly not Socinian. The revisors also of the Danish version call themselves Trinitarians and Protestants; though, had they been Turks or Hindoos, a test in Earl-street would not have altered their translation, for Earl-street had nothing to do with it. The leaders of the opposition to the Bible Society know all this full well: why then do they urge on ignorant persons such statements as must inevitably mislead them? How is it that men professing CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 364.

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to act on "Scriptural principles," could so adroitly forget Mr. Platt's own testimony, that the London Bible-Society had nothing to do with the Danish Version, and could exercise no control over it; and this when Mr. Platt himself was sitting side by side among them? How could the writer of the Sackville-street manifesto, with all these facts before him, presume so far upon the ignorance, or the party-spirit of his readers, as to venture to assert, even with the convenient loophole of" virtually that is by their aid," that the British-and-Foreign BibleSociety" employed a society of Neologists in Copenhagen to translate the New Testament into Danish;" adding most significantly, "Mark, reader, the natural and most fearful consequence; the translation of the word of the living God was found, when it appeared, full of Socinianism?" Now the writer-I speak, my lord, harsh as it may seem, deliberately and advisedly-the writer knew this statement to be false; he knew that the Earl-street institution never "employed a society of Neologists in Copenhagen," or any where else, to translate the Bible into Danish; and that it had no control whatever over the matter. Yet thus are charges thrown out, and by too many persons believed. On a candid mind, however, such unjust accusations produce only the effect of discrediting the testimony of the writer. I am, therefore, by no means convinced from these exaggerated assertions, that either the Denmark Bible-Society, or the Denmark authorised version, is what these gentlemen state. I could point to innumerable testimonies to the benefits which, by the blessing of God, have resulted from the circulation of the Scriptures in Denmark, which has for many years been carried on with great zeal and vigour; and I confess I feel peculiar interest in the subject, not having forgotten the many interesting and affecting circumstances which have occurred in the annals of the Danish Bible-Society*: nor am I destitute of considerable collations respecting the very translation in question, which shew the utter want of truth and charity in calling it "a spurious Socinian version." Your lordship remembers the charge of the Infidel-Lausanne version. But all this I purposely pass over, as beside my argument. Grant all that Mr. Haldane and his friends aver respecting the version; still the Earlstreet Society, whom it is intended to wound, escapes unharmed. I might add also, in justice to the Danish Bible-Society, that the printing of vernacular Bibles in Denmark, as in England, is a patent privilege, having been conferred by royal charter upon the Foundling Hospital in Copenhagen in the year 1740, with heavy penalties and confiscation in case of any other person's printing or importing a single copy into Denmark, and the copies printed by the Hospital were those of the authorized version, which were the only ones that the Society could purchase or circulate. The Danish Bible-Society had no concern in the version objected to, any more than the British-and-Foreign Bible-Society in our authorized English translation; it was a matter

Fifteen hundred Testaments in their way from London to Iceland, the first-fruits of British liberality in its biblical connexion with Denmark, were lying in the warehouses at Copenhagen during Admiral Gambier's bombardment in 1807, and all escaped destruction, though bombs exploded around them, and one of the buildings in which they were contained was burned to the ground except the spot where these copies were deposited. One of the very early transactions of the British-and-Foreign Bible-Society was printing an edition of the Scriptures in their native tongue, for the Danish prisoners of war, of whom there were nearly three thousand in our prisons. Among more than five hundred in Greenlaw, there was but one Danish Bible, which the owner had rescued when he lost almost every thing else. How much did such labours of Christian mercy soften the horrors of war; and who can say what spiritual blessings some of these poor captives may have carried back to their native glens and mountains from the land of their exile?

regulated by the authorities in church and state.

There are similar

laws in other parts of Europe, and they have often caused great impediments to the operations of Bible Societies; but it is doubly hard and unjust to make the Societies accountable for them. The copies sent from this country to Denmark, which have always been from pure editions, were only for the use of the Danish dependencies; they could not be used in Denmark.

TURKISH.

The Turkish Testament, which is the last head of accusation under this letter, furnishes another of those memorable instances to which I have before alluded, in which it has pleased Him, who alone knows what is best for his servants, to try the faith and patience of the friends of the Bible Society, in a matter where all seemed hope and love and joy. The whole narrative is so interesting, that I must trespass with it upon your lordship's kindness. The sun rose brightly; a cloud came across it but it has dispersed, or is dispersing; and now that man is humbled, God shall be exalted; and this Turkish Testament, which has been made, most unfairly, a thorn to goad the Bible Society, will, I doubt not, in generations to come, be one of its brightest gems; rather, would I say, will, through the power of the Holy Ghost, in the conversion of sinners, add many a bright gem to the crown of Him who hath purchased for himself an eternal diadem of righteousness and beauty; and who, in the glowing realms of the false prophet, not less than the dark abodes of paganism, shall see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied. The storm will blow over; but even were the Bible Society crushed with its violence, the benefit to ages yet unborn, -the benefit of immortal souls, rescued from sin and Satan, and translated to realms of heavenly glory, through the obedience unto death of Him whose infinite sacrifice this much-calumniated book will convey to millions yet unborn,-shall still remain.

The history of the affair is briefly as follows. In the year 1814 Mr. (now Dr.) Pinkerton, being on a tour in the Netherlands, sent information to London, respecting a Turkish translation of the whole Bible in manuscript, which had been deposited for a century and a half in the archives of the University of Leyden. Your lordship cannot have forgotten the delight with which this intelligence was received by every biblical scholar and every friend of religion, more especially when it was stated by a venerable nobleman, Baron Von Diez, who had formerly been the Russian Ambassador at Constantinople, and was a competent Turkish scholar, and whose character stood high for piety and zeal for the propagation of Divine truth, that "the translation was accurate, and the style most excellent," and that he himself would edit the manuscript, and superintend its printing. To convey the whole inspired word of God into the very strongholds of the false prophet, was a prospect that filled with joy every Christian heart; and it seemed, without any desecration of the word, truly providential that this manuscript should have been so long prepared, and have survived all the vicissitudes of years, and the conflagrations and sackings of the late war, till the return of peace, and the institution of Bible Societies afforded facilities for its printing and circulation.

Respecting the translation of this invaluable manuscript, Dr. Pinkerton obtained the following particulars, which I give in his own words:"Hali (or Ali) Bey was born in Poland in the beginning of the seventeenth centuary. His real name was Albertus Boboosky. While a youth, he was stolen by the Tartars, and sold to the Turks in Constantinople. By them he was educated in the Mohammedan faith, and when he grew up, became first dragoman, or translator to Mohammed IV. He understood seventeen languages, and is said to have spoken