revision of the common version of the Scriptures; although no person
appears to know how or by whom such a revision is to be executed. In my
own view, such revision is not merely a matter of expedience, but of
moral duty; and as I have been encouraged to undertake this work by
respectable literary and religious characters, I have ventured to
attempt a revision upon my own responsibility. If the work should fail
to be well received, the loss will be my own, and I hope no injury will
be done. I have been painfully solicitous that no error should escape
me."

It is not difficult to understand Webster's attitude. He is a
school-master in this business, squaring Elizabethan English to suit the
regularity and uniformity of language which have been the dream of all
school-masters. Rules without exceptions represent the unattainable
ideal of mechanical minds. Webster, vainly endeavoring to reduce
language to an orderly system, was also moved to secure propriety and
decorum. He seems, therefore, to have gone through the book with his
pen, transposing words into a more formal order, removing quaintnesses,
changing old forms into current ones, putting on fig leaves, and, so far
as he dared, shaving the language to fit the measure of the speech of
his day. But he did not undertake the work as a scholar, aiming at a
more exact version, and his emendations, where the sense would be at all
affected, were very inconsiderable. He changed, to be sure, _take no
thought_ into _be not anxious_, as the Revisers have done, and he
incorporated into the text the marginal reading _to them_ for _by them_
in the passage, _Ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old
times._ He substituted _demons_ for _devils_, as the American Committee
preferred; he tried to put _hell_ in its proper place, and in some
trivial instances he was more exact in his use of prepositions, but one
would look in vain for any sign of Hebrew or Greek scholarship beyond
the most rudimentary.

Nor in respect of English did he seem to have any conception of style or
color; he patched clauses with words of his time, when he desired to
remove an obsolete expression, without any sense, apparently, of
incongruousness, and he removed words which were still perfectly clear
in meaning, only because they would not in his day so be used. He was
very much disturbed by what he regarded as inelegance, and picturesque
phrases or words were likely to give way to more commonplace one