We can imagine ourselves standing on the shore at Dover in 1660, fifty years after the version was issued, waiting with the crowd to see the banished King return. The civil war is over, the protectorate under Cromwell is past. Charles II., thick-lipped, sensuous, "seeming to belong rather to southern Europe than to Puritan England," is about to land from France, whence the people, wearied with Puritan excesses, have called him back. There is a great crowd, but they do not cheer wildly. There is something serious on hand. They mean to welcome the King; but it is on condition. Their first act is when the Mayor of Dover places in his hands a copy of the English Bible, which the King declares he loves above all things in the world. It proves only a sorry jest; but the English people think it is meant for truth, and they go to their homes rejoicing. They rejoiced too soon, for this is that utterly faithless king for whom his witty courtier proposed an epitaph: "Here lies our sovereign lord, the king, Whose word no man relies on; Who never said a foolish thing, And never did a wise one."[1] [1] White, in his History of England, says that Charles replied that the explanation was easy: His discourses were his own, his actions were his ministry's! As at other times, the King was only talking with no meaning; but the people did not know him yet. They had made their Bible the great test of their liberties: will a king stand by that or will he not? If he will not, let him remember Charles the First! And from that day no English king, no American leader, has ever successfully restricted English-speaking people from free access to their great Book. It has become a banner of their liberties. The child was wiser than he knew when he was asked what lesson we may learn from Charles I., and replied that we may learn that a man should not lose his head in times of excitement. Charles lost his head long before he laid it on the block. Besides the scene at Dover, we may watch that great emigration of the Scotch-Irish from Ulster, beginning in 1689, seventy years after the Puritan exodus and eighty years after the version was issued, which peopled the backwoods of America with a choice, strong population. They were only following the right to worship freely, the right to their Bible without chains on its lids or on the lips of its preachers. They were making no protest against Romanism nor against Anglicanism in themselves. They only claimed the right to worship as they would. Under William and Mary, after James II. had fled to France, toleration became the law in England; but when Ireland was reconquered by William's generals, the act of toleration was not extended to it. Baptists, Presbyterians, all except the small Anglican Church, were put under the ban and forbidden to worship. But the Bible had made submission impossible, and there came about that great exodus to the new land which has so blessed it.