The subject of the influence of an English Bible upon English nomenclature is not uninteresting. It may be said of the "Vulgar Tongue" Bible that it revolutionized our nomenclature within the space of forty years, or little over a generation. No such crisis, surely, ever visited a nation's register before, nor can such possibly happen again. Every home felt the effect. It was like the massacre of the innocents in Egyptian days: "There was not one house where there was not one dead." But in Pharoah's day they did not replace the dead with the living. At the Reformation such a locust army of new names burst upon the land that we may well style it the Hebrew Invasion. CHAPTER I. THE HEBREW INVASION. "With what face can they object to the king the bringing in of forraigners, when themselves entertaine such an army of Hebrewes?" _The Character of a London Diurnall_ (Dec. 1644). "Albeit in our late Reformation some of good consideration have brought in Zachary, Malachy, Josias, etc., as better agreeing with our faith, but without contempt of Country names (as I hope) which have both good and gracious significations, as shall appeare hereafter."--CAMDEN, _Remaines_. 1614. I. _The March of the Army._ The strongest impress of the English Reformation to-day is to be seen in our font-names. The majority date from 1560, the year when the Genevan Bible was published. This version ran through unnumbered editions, and for sixty, if not seventy, years was the household Bible of the nation. The Genevan Bible was not only written in the vulgar tongue, but was printed for vulgar hands. A moderate quarto was its size; all preceding versions, such as Coverdale's, Matthew's, and of course the Great Bible, being the ponderous folio, specimens of which the reader will at some time or other have seen. The Genevan Bible, too, was the Puritan's Bible, and was none the less admired by him on account of its Calvinistic annotations. But although the rage for Bible names dates from the decade 1560-1570, which decade marks the rise of Puritanism, there had been symptoms of the coming revolution as early as 1543. Richard Hilles, one of the Reformers, despatching a letter from Strasburg, November 15, 1543, writes: "My wife says she has no doubt but that God helped her the sooner in her confinement by reason of your good prayers. On the second of this month she brought forth to the Church of Christ a son, who, as the women say, is quite large enough for a mother of tall stature, and whom I immediately named _Gershom_."--"Original Letters," 1537-1558, No. cxii. Parker Society. We take up our Bibles, and find that of Zipporah it is said-- "And she bare him (Moses) a son, and he called his name Gershom: for he said, _I have been a stranger in a strange land_."--Exod. ii. 22.