Some people in sore straits try to strike bargains with God, if only He will keep them safe or relieve them in the present necessity. It’s a good story of the soldier who, with all the shells exploding round him was heard to pray: “O Lord, if You’ll only get me out of this d--d mess I will be good, I will be good!” I am reminded of what I call the “Pith and Marrow” which the pious men put at the head of every chapter of the Bible, and which, alas! has been expunged in the literary exactitudes of the Revised Version. Regard Chapter xxvi, for instance, of Proverbs--how it is all summed up by those “diverse excellent learned men.” They wrote at the top of the chapter “Observations about Fools.” Matthew xxii: the Saviour “_Poseth_ the Pharisees.” Isaiah xxi: “The _set_ time.” Isaiah xxvii (so true and pithy of the Chapter!): “Chastisements differ from Judgments”; and in Mark xv: “The Clamour of the Common People”--descriptive of what’s in the chapter. All these headings, in my opinion, as regards those ancient translators, are for them a “Crown of Glory and a Diadem of Beauty”; and I have a feeling that, when they finished their wondrous studies, it was with them as Solomon said, “The desire accomplished is sweet to the Soul.” DR. GINSBURG _March 27th, 1918._ DEAR FRIEND, When I was at Bath I read in the local paper a beautiful letter aptly alluding to the Mount Fiesole of Bath and quoting what has been termed that mysterious verse of David’s: “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills----.” Well! the other day a great friend of that wonderful Hebrew scholar, Dr. Ginsburg--he died long since at Capri--told me that Ginsburg had said to him that all the Revisers and Translators had missed a peculiar Hebraism which quite alters the signification of this opening verse of the 121st Psalm: It should read: “_Shall_ I lift up mine eyes to those hills? DOTH my help come from thence?” And this is the explanation: Those hills alluded to were the hills in which were the Groves planted in honour of the idols towards which Israel had strayed. So in the second verse the inspired tongue says: “No! My help cometh from the Lord! He who hath made Heaven and Earth! (not these idols).” I have had an admiration for Ginsburg ever since he shut up the two Atheists in the Athenæum Club, Huxley and Herbert Spencer, who were reviling Holy Writ in Ginsburg’s presence and flouting him. So he asked the two of them to produce anything anywhere in literature comparable to the 23rd Psalm as translated by Wyclif, Tyndale, and Coverdale. He gave them a week to examine, and at the end of it they confessed that they could not. One of them (I could not find out which it was) wrote: