74 JOURNAL AND PROCEEDINGS 



But as this present-day picture fades from view, another 

 scene marked by darksome shadows looms up from the past, 

 depicting the exile, deprivation and suffering of scholars who 

 four centuries ago first gave to meu of modern English 

 speech a printed Bible in their mother tongue, albeit that 

 gift for a time could be read only by those who ventured to 

 face gruesome penalties. The descent of our Knglish Bible 

 can be directly traced back through the Ivatin, Greek and 

 Hebrew languages. From well defined differences of 

 structure, I^atin and Greek rank with the Aryan group of 

 languages, and Hebrew with the Semitic group. But it is 

 interesting to know, despite these differences, that in their 

 alphabets, the elements of written speech, trails of kinship 

 have been traced. Indeed, one of the fairy tales told by 

 linguists is their history of the Alphabet. After years of 

 study, Rouge and Lenormant concluded that nineteen letters 

 of our alphabet have come in direct descent from the 

 alphabets of Rome, Greece and Phoenicia ; and primarily 

 from that system of hieroglyphics called by the Egyptians 

 themselves "the writings of divine word." These con- 

 clusions are widely received as true. It by no means follows, 

 however, because an alphabet may be traceable to a Semitic 

 origin, that the language it gives expression to, or the people 

 speaking it, are also Semitic, 



The English Bible in general use contains sixty-six 

 books. But the authorized version of James the First was 

 printed with fourteen additional apocryphal books that were 

 included in the canon adopted at the fourth session of the 

 Council of Trent. By a large part of Christendom the 

 Aprotrypha is still revered as a portion of the canonical 

 scriptures. Almost all the Old Testament has been 

 transmitted in Hebrew ; the exceptions being some chapters 

 in the books of Daniel, Ezra and Jeremiah. St. Jerome, 

 fifteen hundred years ago, in his most interesting preface to 

 the book of Daniel, pointed out that these special portions of 

 the Bible, though written with the Hebrew alphabet, were in 

 the Chaldaic and not in the Hebrew tongue. Of late 



