It is not difficult to understand Webster's attitude. He is a school-master in this business, squaring Elizabethan English to suit the regularity and uniformity of language which have been the dream of all school-masters. Rules without exceptions represent the unattainable ideal of mechanical minds. Webster, vainly endeavoring to reduce language to an orderly system, was also moved to secure propriety and decorum. He seems, therefore, to have gone through the book with his pen, transposing words into a more formal order, removing quaintnesses, changing old forms into current ones, putting on fig leaves, and, so far as he dared, shaving the language to fit the measure of the speech of his day. But he did not undertake the work as a scholar, aiming at a more exact version, and his emendations, where the sense would be at all affected, were very inconsiderable. He changed, to be sure, _take no thought_ into _be not anxious_, as the Revisers have done, and he incorporated into the text the marginal reading _to them_ for _by them_ in the passage, _Ye have heard that it hath been said by them of old times._ He substituted _demons_ for _devils_, as the American Committee preferred; he tried to put _hell_ in its proper place, and in some trivial instances he was more exact in his use of prepositions, but one would look in vain for any sign of Hebrew or Greek scholarship beyond the most rudimentary. Nor in respect of English did he seem to have any conception of style or color; he patched clauses with words of his time, when he desired to remove an obsolete expression, without any sense, apparently, of incongruousness, and he removed words which were still perfectly clear in meaning, only because they would not in his day so be used. He was very much disturbed by what he regarded as inelegance, and picturesque phrases or words were likely to give way to more commonplace ones. He did not like _gather together_ and substituted the more rotund _assemble_, _collect_, or _convene_; _three score_ he wrote _sixty_; he hustled out the strong phrase _gave up the ghost_, and put in its place the "elegant" _expire_; _peradventure_ yielded to _perhaps_ or _it may be; laugh to scorn_ he wrote _deride_. A good example of his indifference to racy English is in his substituting _in health_ for _safe and sound_ in the clause, _because he hath received him safe and sound_. "This is another instance," he writes in his Introduction, "in which the translators have followed popular use instead of the original Greek, which signifies simply _well_ or _in health_."