advantages of Books or Studies lay, which when supervised by all the rest, dayes of assembling together were to have been set apart, to seek the Lord for His further direction, and for conference with each other touching the matter then under consideration. In process of time this whole work was almost compleated, and stayed for nothing but the appointment of Commissioners to examine it, and warrant its publication.” The death of Cromwell, and the political events which followed, prevented the realization of Jessey’s hopes. It had been with him the work of many years of his life, and his soul was so engaged in it that he frequently uttered the prayer, “O that I might see this done before I die.” The ecclesiastical events arising out of the Act of Uniformity (1662) will sufficiently account for the absence of any efforts of revision during the latter part of the seventeenth century. In the earlier part of the following century there appeared one of those ill-advised attempts, whose chief use is to serve as a beacon of warning, in the Greek and English New Testament, published A.D. 1729, by W. Mace, M.D.[97] In his translation this author allowed himself to employ an unpleasantly free style of rendering, and deemed it fitting to substitute the colloquial style of the day for the dignified simplicity of the version he undertook to amend. Towards the latter part of the century a considerable number of well-meant endeavours at revision were made by devout and scholarly men. In 1764 “A new and literal Translation of the Old and New Testament, with notes, critical and explanatory,” was published by Anthony Purver, a member of the Society of Friends. In 1770 there was issued “The New Testament, or New Covenant of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, translated from the Greek according to the present idiom of the English tongue, with notes and references,” by John Worsley, of Hertford, whose aim, as stated in his preface, was to bring his translation nearer to the original, and “to make the present form of expression more suitable to our present language,” adding, with a laudable desire to repudiate all sympathy with those who forced the Scripture to say what, according to their own fancies, it ought to say, “I have no design to countenance any particular opinions or sentiments. I have weighed, as it were, every word in a balance, even to the minutest particle, begging the gracious aid of the Divine Spirit to lead me into the true and proper meaning, that I might give a just and exact translation of this great and precious charter of man’s salvation.”[98]