culmination came in the fifteenth century, when everywhere fresh translations were attempted. In Germany more than forty different types of translation can be counted, and one of them, containing the whole Bible, was printed fourteen times before the period of the Reformation (Plate XVI). There was only one translation, however, with a value of its own, and that was the Spanish, for this was made from the Hebrew Old Testament by the help of some Spanish Jews. Both the king of Spain and the high clergy showed at that time a remarkable breadth of view in trying to get a trustworthy translation. All other versions in the West were based upon the Latin Vulgate as the recognised Bible of the church, and they were made with more devotion than knowledge. The translators usually did not know Latin well nor were they masters of their own language. They translated word for word, and the result was sometimes strange. It is of no great importance that, not recognising in "Tertius" and "Quartus" proper names, one of these translators said "the third" and "the fourth." It was worse when another explained "encænia" in John 10 : 22, the feast of dedication, as meaning "wedding," or declared the words in Matt. 27 : 46, "Eli, Eli," to be Greek. Sometimes the translation resulted in pure nonsense, and even where it made sense, it was difficult and often far from the true meaning. Now humanism insisted upon going back to the original languages. Erasmus, in 1516, published the first edition of the New Testament in Greek. We see how Luther, at this time professor at the University of Wittenberg, lecturing upon Romans when this edition came into his hands, was impressed by this new source of information. He eagerly set himself to learn Greek with the help of his friend Melanchthon, and so he was prepared for the great task of translating the New Testament directly out of the Greek into German. It was during his exile in the Wartburg that he found the necessary time to make this translation. It appeared in print in September, 1522, and it is astonishing in how short a time this New Testament circulated all through Germany. It was reprinted everywhere, and often very carelessly, so that Luther had to complain against the printers as falsifying his translation. He himself did not take any payment for his work; he wanted the publishers to sell it as cheaply as possible. And it was a masterpiece, not only for the beauty of the language, which was the best and most popular German that had ever been written but also in the way Luther translated, giving not the single words but the meaning of the sentences, not transferring from one vocabulary to the other but transmuting (if one may say so) the whole expression of thought from Greek into German. The Bible became a German book; one hardly feels that he is reading a translation. Luther had more trouble with the Old Testament. In order to master the Hebrew he had to