In July of the same year an address to the Crown was moved in the House of Commons by Mr. Heywood, member for North Lancashire, praying that Her Majesty would appoint a Royal Commission of learned men to consider of such amendments of the authorized version of the Bible as had been already proposed, and to receive suggestions from all persons who might be willing to offer them, and to report the amendments which they might be prepared to recommend. In the January of the following year a resolution in support of revision was proposed at the general meeting of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, by the Rev. G. F. Biber, LL.D., who subsequently published the substance of his speech in support of this resolution, under the title, _A Plea for an Edition of the Authorized Version of Holy Scripture with explanatory and emendatory marginal readings_. Pamphlets also were published the same year by Dr. Beard and by Dr. Henry Burgess; but, what it is more important to note, in that year there was published the first of a series of works which were intended to show by example the kind of work which the wiser advocates of revision desired to see undertaken. This was _The Gospel according to John, after the Authorized Version, newly compared with the original Greek, and revised by five clergymen--John Barrow, D.D.; George Moberly, D.C.L.; Henry Alford, B.D.; William G. Humphry, B.D.; Charles J. Ellicott, M.A._ In that same year also Dr. Trench, then Dean of Westminster (now Archbishop of Dublin), published his work _On the Authorized Version of the New Testament_; and in 1863 Dr. Plumptre, in the _Dictionary of the Bible_, reiterated the statement, “The work ought not to be delayed much longer.” In the spring of 1870 the desirableness of a fresh revision of the English Bible was advocated--by Dr. J. B. Lightfoot in a paper read before a meeting of clergy; by the writer of these lectures in a paper read before the annual meeting of the Congregational Union of England and Wales; by the _British Quarterly Review_ in its January number; and, finally, by the _Quarterly Review_ in its April number. A weighty sentence from the last-mentioned writer will be a fitting conclusion to the present lecture. “It is positive unfaithfulness on the part of those who have ability and opportunity to decline the task. The Word of God, just because it is God’s Word, ought to be presented to every reader in a state as pure and perfect as human learning, skill, and taste can make it. The higher our veneration for it the more anxious ought we to be to free it from every blemish, however small and unimportant. But nothing in truth can be unimportant which dims the light of Divine Revelation.” LECTURE IX. _THE REVISION OF 1881._ To the general consensus of opinion described in the last lecture practical expression was first given by the action of the Convocation of Canterbury, in the early part of 1870.