It is a great privilege of the German nation that it received this excellent Bible at the very beginning of the new era. The German language is moulded by this Bible. In Luther's time the dialects still prevailed. Luther's Bible had to be translated into the dialect of lower Germany. The south of Germany and Switzerland had quite another dialect. The Zürich reformers, in 1529, published a Bible in this dialect, translating from Luther's Bible as far as it existed at this time and providing for the rest a translation of their own. It is unquestionably due to Luther's Bible that the Germans have now one language for all literary purposes. The German classic writers Herder, Wieland, Klopstock, Lessing, Schiller, Goethe were all trained from their childhood by the language of this Bible. Even now there is a remarkable difference in style between authors of Protestant and of Roman Catholic origin in Germany. In the easy and fluent language of the former we see the influence of Luther and Goethe, whereas the latter often show a certain stiffness and a greater number of provincialisms. The attempts to translate the Bible independently of Luther have never succeeded in gaining any large circulation, although there have been many such, not only from the Roman Catholic side but also from Protestants. A famous one is the so-called Berleburg Bible, by certain mystics, published in 1726-42 in eight volumes. In the nineteenth century scholars undertook to give more scientific and more exact translations, but, valuable as these may be for scholarly purposes, the German people will never abandon its classic Bible. It is difficult even to introduce a revision. There was a revision some twenty years ago, but in this Luther's text was retouched and altered only at a very few points, most of the corrections introduced by the revision committee being rather restitutions of Luther's original renderings, which had been badly "improved" by former printers. It is remarkable that even the printed Bible never stands still, but is always changing, the printers acting as the copyists did in former times. The copies of the revised text printed at Stuttgart differ slightly from the copies printed at Halle and Berlin, to mention three of the modern centres of German Bible printing.