It would be tedious to cite more than one example, and I will take it in the very first sentence of Mr. Hoare’s translation. “What joy,” he says, “for those with the poor man’s feelings! Heaven’s Empire is for them,” the authorised translation of which is too familiar to need quotation. I do not see what is gained, setting aside the cost, by the substitution of the exclamatory “What joy ...” for the ecstatic affirmation, “Blessed are the poor.” Why again, “the poor man,” and, after that, the “poor man’s feelings”? Why also “Heaven’s Empire” instead of “the Kingdom of Heaven”; and why “is for them” instead of “theirs is”? The gain, even literally, is imperceptible, and in cost a world of meaning has been sacrificed. “Blessed” is an incomparably more spiritual word than “joy”—in English, at any rate, whatever their respective originals may indicate; and there is a plane of difference between an incontinent ejaculation such as “What joy,” which resembles “What fun,” and has in view rather a prospect than a fact—and the serene and confident utterance of an assured truth. Further, and again without regard to the literal original, “a poor man’s feelings” must be miles away, from the intention of the original authors, since it definitely conveys to us associations derived from social surroundings, social reform, and what not. Was _this_ the intention of the Sermon on the Mount, the very location of which symbolised a state of mind above that of the dwellers in the plain of common life? Was it a socialist or communist discourse? If not, the “poor man’s feelings,” in our English colloquial sense, is utterly out of place, and the original must have meant something symbolically different. The substitution, again, of “Heaven’s Empire” for the “Kingdom of Heaven” may be, as Professor Dodd assures us, a more correct literal translation of the original phrase; but only a literary barbarian can contemplate it without grieving over the lost worlds of meaning. What is the prospect of an “Empire,” even Heaven’s Empire, to us to-day? As certainly as the phrase “Kingdom of Heaven” has come to mean, in English, a state of beatitude, the reversion to an “Empire” marks the decline of that state to one of outward pomp and circumstance. The spiritual meaning which must have characterised the intention of the Sermon on the Mount is completely sacrificed in the substitution of Empire for Kingdom. The volume is published by the “Congregational Union of England and Wales,” and it serves to indicate the depths to which Nonconformist taste can sink. We only need now this “colloquial English” version in the “nu speling” to touch bottom.