e 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, whi