It has been the rule in China that a mandarin must not be a native of the province where he holds office; and, of course, it is essential that he should be acquainted with the speech which constitutes the _lingua franca_. Perhaps for this reason it is called Mandarin. But down to the time when missionary publications rendered it common in print, it was not employed in that mode. All books, business or government documents, the one newspaper of the country, which was the court gazette, and all letters were in the higher or, as it is called, the Wen-li form, the only exception being some novels, and even these were streaked with Wen-li. This, however, ran through gradations,—from the highest, which is so condensed and so bristles with erudite allusions that only a trained scholar can understand it, down to a modification which is so easy that with a slight alteration of particles it is almost the same as the Mandarin. During the long period of the nineteenth century preceding the meeting of the second general missionary conference, a number of translations of the Scriptures, some of them of the whole, and some of parts, had been made, and had come more or less into use. The men who did this pioneer work deserve to be held in perpetual esteem, especially in view of the difficulties under which they labored. Among the missionaries who sat in that conference there was no disposition to withhold this honor, or to disparage the value of these early translations; but there was so widely prevalent among them and their associates at that time on the field a conviction that no existing version was satisfactory, that they recognized it as a duty to take up the subject, and to initiate steps looking to the production of a better. An informal consultation as to this was held by a few men, a couple of days before the conference assembled; but inasmuch as Dr. Mateer had not been invited, he did not attend. Another consultation was held the following day, and because of his great interest in the subject of a Bible revision, he attended without an invitation. The views expressed clearly indicated that there was a general agreement that a revision was desirable, but it also was made very plain that beyond this there was a wide divergence of opinion. We will allow one of his letters to a representative of the American Bible Society, under date of May 26, 1890, to tell the next step in this great undertaking: