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Mr Carter accomplished the astonishing feat of 
preacliing his first sermon in the vernacular 
exactly four months after his lauding in the Island. 
I have often iieard Mr John Ferguson, the well- 
known editor of tlie Ceylon Observer, relate, how, 
in the early days of his residence in Colombo, he 
used often to accompany Mr Carter on his visits 
to village congregations and to mark the looks of 
astonishment and admiration on the faces of the 
people as they heard this foreigner use their own 
language as fluently as themselves, and with a 
force and pointedness which they could not rival. 
A number of more or less imperfect translations 
of the Scriptures into Sinhalese had been made 
before Mr Carter's time ; the one then in general 
use had been produced by an inter-denominational 
committee under the auspices of the British and 
Foreign Bible Society. Mr Carter's criticisms of 
this work were at first hotly resented by some, 
but later its many imperfections were pretiy gene- 
rally admitted. But Mr Carter did not rush into 
translation work. It was only, 1 believe, at the 
end of his first long term of service in the field and 
at the urgent request of a large number of our 
native Christians, who had had many obscure 
passages of Scripture made intelligible to them by 
his pulpit expositions, that he made his first 
essay in this direction, and then only to the niodesD 
extent of producing a translation of the Book of 
Psalms. Later, when under the auspices of the 
Bible Translation Society he was preparing to 
translate the whole Bible, overtures were made to 
him witli a view to get him to associate with him 
self some other missionaries and some native 
Pundits, and Mr Garter was not averse to this ; but 
in the end it was not found practicable. They wanted 
the English, Bible to be taken as the basis instead 
of translating from the Hebrew and Greek ; 
they were not prepared to embody to the extent 
that) Mr Carter was the settled results of textual 
criticism; and various other difficulties appeared in 
which tue native Pundits played a conspicuous part. 
There are three distinct strata in the Sinhalese 
language. Lowest down is the home vernacular, 
the bazaar Sinhalese — tliis is racy and vary 
idiomatic, but slangy and ungrammatical. Above 
this is the grammatical colloquial, the everyday 
speech of educated people, the language in which 
most of the newspapers were written twenty-nve 
years ago, the language in which our preaching and 
all public speaking is carried on. Highest of all is 
the classical Sinhalese, highly Sanskriti&ed and 
fully inflected, which nobody uses or can use for 
any length of time in conversation or public 
speaking — the language of the old Buddhist books. 
The British and Foreign Bible Society have always 
used this highest style tor their Bible. By so 
doing they have secured for the Bible a place in 
literature, but that doubtful advantage has been 
purchased at a great cost, for their Bible is largely 
unintelligible to the common and illiterate people. 
Mr Carter, with the approval of all our Baptise 
missionaries on the spot, and in consultation with 
Dr Benjamin Davies, Dr Underbill, and, I 
believe, Mr (now Dr) Kouse, decided to adopt the 
middle style. The result is that you can put our 
Bible into the hands of any villager who can read 
and he finds no difficulty whatever with it, for it is 
in a style of speech that all understand perfectly. 
It cannot be stated too plainly that Mr Carter's 
object was not to produce a "Baptist Bible." This 
charge has been at times freely made against 
Jijm, At one time au itiaeraut revivalist found 
his way to the town of Kandy, and in one of his 
addresses said that he had heard of a missionary 
who had spent seven years of his life in changing 
the word "baptise" in the Sinhalese Bible into 
"dip"; but there were many iutluential men who 
knew the work Mr Gaiter was doing and appre- 
ciated it hit;hly, and the evangelist was compelled 
to retract the statement as puUlicly as it had been 
made. " You are very keen about translating 
the Greek word ' baptize,' " said an irate Presby- 
terian one day, "why don't you translate 'phy- 
lactery' and ' Sabbath,' too?" '-That is just what 
I am doing," quietly replied Mr Carter. From 
which you will see that he was thorough, if not 
radical, in his adherence to the idea embodied in 
the title of our Society. 
In 1881 Mr Carter in broken health had to leave 
for New Zealand. For months the doctors had 
been begging him to leave Ceylon before it was 
too late, and about February, 1881, I was urged 
by his doctor in Kandy to press upon him as 
insistently as I possibly could the necessity for 
his immediate departure, but the only reply I goc 
was that he had given into every previous repre- 
sentation, " Oh, yes, I am going as soon as my 
New Testament is through tlie press." At times 
ic seemed as though he would never get 
away, and I was often reminded during the 
succeeding months of the old story ot the venerable 
Bede dictating the last verses of John with his last 
gasp, and then echoing his Scribe's triumphant 
words, " lb is finished," lying back to speak no 
more. But his indomitable courage was rewarded, 
and before he sailed the complete New Testament; 
was put into his hands. This was a revision, and 
was produced in 1881 before the English revised 
version had reached Ceylon, but when that did 
come, it was found that Mr, Carter had anticipated 
its alterations in the text, and that his Sinhalese 
version read almost like a translation of it, except 
that here and there the Sinhalese possessed a 
more radical flavour, which was certainly no defect. 
When about 1895 this revision ran out of print 
Mr. Carter re-revised it and brought it up abreast 
of the scholarship of that time. Since then he has 
been engaged in revising the Oid Testament. 
When that has been completed we shall have a 
Sinhalese Bible that will be able to challenge 
comparison with the best translations everywhere ; 
a Bible that is not a mere translation of a transla- 
tion, but possessing the distinction (in Ceylon) of 
having been translated direct froni the Hebrew 
and Greek; a Bible that gives to tlie Sinhalese 
a vernacular equivalent for a large number of 
Hebrew and Greek words not translated in any 
other Sinhalese version ; a Bible that embodies 
the results of the best critical scholarship; a Bible 
that tells its Divine message in a dialect at once 
correct and dignified but understood by the people 
everywhere. The Bible will never be the Bible of 
the native Pundits, for to these gentlemen in- 
telligibility is but as the small dust of the balance 
in comparison with conformity to antique literary 
standards. But I am quite certaiu that it will 
remain for a long time the Student's Bible, the 
Preacher's Bible and the People's Bible. — 
Missionary Herald, September, 1903. 
THE ORIGIN OF JEWELLERY. 
BY PROFESSOR W. RIDGEWAY. 
The following is an abstract from a very inter- 
esting and instructive paper read by Professor W. 
