ch the Scotch
monopolists would not permit to circulate in Scotland. Bible societies
in Scotland had received, in return for their subscription to the London
society, copies of an octavo Bible in large type, to which the Scotch
patentees had no corresponding edition, and which was much prized by the
aged. And it was because Dr. Thompson and others helped to circulate it,
as agents of the London Bible Society, that they were proceeded against.
The Scotch Bible, in consequence of the monopoly, was as badly printed as
the English one. In order to show how monopoly had failed to secure good
work, a gentleman sent to the Archbishop of Canterbury an enormous list
of errors which he had found in the Oxford Nonpareil Bible. In an old
Scotch edition the apostle is made to say, 'Know ye not that the
righteous shall _not_ inherit the kingdom of God?' In another edition
'The four beasts of the Apocalypse' are '_sour_ beasts.' Dr. Lee,
afterwards Principal of Edinburgh University, felt deeply the injustice
done by the monopoly, and the heavy taxation consequently imposed upon
the British and Foreign Bible Society; but he was a man of the study
rather than of the street. Yet in 1837 the monopoly, powerfully defended
as it was by Sir Robert Inglis, who dreaded cheap editions of the Word of
God, as necessarily incorrect and leading to wickedness and infidelity of
all kinds, fell, and it was to John Childs, of Bungay, that in a great
measure the fall was due, while owing to the repeated labours of Dr. Adam
Thompson and others, we got cheaper Bibles and Testaments on the other
side of the Tweed.

If you turn to the life of Dr. Adam Thompson, of Coldstream, the man who
had the most publicly to do with the fall of the monopoly, there can be
no doubt on this head. Though specially interested in the English
patents, Mr. Childs was aware that the one for Scotland fell, to be
renewed sooner by twenty years, and he kept dunning Joseph Hume on the
subject, who, Radical Reformer, at that time had his hands pretty full.
Mr. Childs had got so far as to have his Committee, and to get the
evidence printed. What was the next step? Dr. Thompson's biographer
shall tell us. 'Mr. Childs had been looking out for a Scottish
Dissenting minister of proved ability, zeal, and influence, who should
feel the immense and urgent importance of the question, and after
mastering the unjust principles and the injurious results of the
monopoly, should testify