Reports from the stationers show that there is no demand at all for the
revised edition of the Bible, and had it not been for the newspapers
publishing the whole affair there would have been very few persons that
took the trouble to even glance at it, and it is believed that not one
reader of the daily papers in a hundred read any of the Bible, and not one
in ten thousand read all of it which was published. Who originated this
scheme of revising the Bible we do not know, but whoever it was made a
miscue. There was no one suffering particularly for a revision of the
Bible. It was good enough as it was. No literary sharp of the present day
has got any license to change anything in the Bible.
Why, the cheeky ghouls have actually altered over the Lord's Prayer, cut
it biased, and thrown the parts about giving us this day our daily bread
into the rag bag. How do they know that the Lord said more than he wanted
to in that prayer? He wanted that daily bread in there, or He never would
have put it in. The only wonder is that those revisers did not insert
strawberry shortcake and ice cream in place of daily bread. Some of these
ministers who are writing speeches for the Lord think they are smart. They
have fooled with Christ's sermon on the Mount until He couldn't tell it if
He was to meet it in the Chicago _Times_.
This thing has gone on long enough, and we want a stop put to it. We have
kept still about the piracy that has been going on in the Bible because
people who are better than we are have seemed to endorse it, but now we
are sick of it, and if there is going to be an annual clerical picnic to
cut gashes in the Bible and stick new precepts and examples on where they
will do the most hurt, we shall lock up our old Bible where the critters
can't get at it and throw the first book agent down stairs head
first that tries to shove off on to us one of these new-fangled,
go-as-you-please Bibles, with all the modern improvements, and hell left
out.
Now, where was there a popular demand to have hell left out of the Bible?
Were there any petitions from the people sent up to this self-constituted
legislature of pinchbeck ministers, praying to have hell abolished, and
"hades" inserted? Not a petition. And what is this hades? Where is it?
Nobody knows. They have taken away our orthodox hell, that has stood by us
since we first went to Sunday school, and given us a hades. Half of us
wouldn't know a hades if we should see it dead in the road, but they
couldn't fool us any on hell.
No, these revisers have done more harm to religion than they could have
done by preaching all their lives. They have opened the ball, and now,
every time a second-class dominie gets out of a job, he is going to cut
and slash into the Bible. He will think up lots of things that will sound
better than some things that are in there, and by and by we shall have our
Bibles as we do our almanacs, annually, with weather probabilities on the
margins.
This is all wrong. Infidels will laugh at us, and say our old Bible is
worn out, and out of style, and tell us to have our measure taken for a
new one every fall and spring, as we do for our clothes. If this revision
is a good thing, why won't another one be better? The woods are full of
preachers who think they could go to work and improve the Bible, and if we
don't shut down on this thing, they will take a hand in it. If a man hauls
down the American flag, we shoot him on the spot; and now we suggest that
if any man mutilates the Bible, we run an umbrella into him and spread it.
The old Bible just filled the bill, and we hope every new one that is
printed will lay on the shelves and get sour. This revision of the Bible
is believed to be the work of an incendiary. It is a scheme got
up by British book publishers to make money out of pious people. It is on
the same principle that speculators get up a corner on pork or wheat. They
got revision, and printed Bibles enough to supply the world, and would not
let out one for love or money. None were genuine unless the name of this
British firm was blown in the bottle.
Millions of Bibles were shipped to this country by the firm that was
"long" on Bibles, and they were to be thrown on the market suddenly, after
being locked up and guarded by the police until the people were made
hungry for Bibles.
The edition was advertised like a circus, and doors were to be opened at
six o'clock in the morning. American publishers who wanted to publish the
Bible, too, got compositors ready to rush out a cheap Bible within twelve
hours, and the Britons, who were running the corner on the Word of God,
called these American publishers pirates. The idea of men being pirates
for printing a Bible, which should be as free as salvation. The newspapers
that had the Bibles telegraphed to them from the east, were also pirates.
O, the revision is a three-card monte speculation; that is all it is.