“What! not the Improved Version?” I shall be asked:—that favourite achievement of your most renowned Unitarian champions;—published by a Unitarian society;—circulated among your laity in three simultaneous editions; when assailed successively by Dr. Nares and Archbishop Magee, repeatedly defended by your ablest critics in your own Journals; containing moreover all the standard heresies of your sect; using all your received methods of getting rid of troublesome texts; and especially relieving you of the doctrine of the miraculous conception by the liberal application of Jehoiakim’s pen-knife to the initial chapters of Matthew and Luke?[58] “The shades of Belsham, Lindsey, Jebb, Priestley, Wakefield, &c., might well be astonished to hear their learned labours so contemptuously spoken of by” the “modern disciples of their school.”[59] Now it so happens, that, excepting two, all these good men were dead before the commencement of that work. Of the two survivors, Mr. Lindsey was disabled, by the infirmities of age, from any participation in it, and scarcely lived to see it published.[60] The remaining divine, Mr. Belsham, was the real editor of this translation; and alone, among Unitarians, must have the whole honour or dishonour of the work. The funds for the publication were doubtless furnished by a society, whose members hoped thus to present the theologian with a valuable contribution to Biblical literature; but had neither power nor wish to bind themselves or others to an approval of its criticisms, or a maintenance of its interpretations. That “all the ministers belonging to this Society” were enrolled in the Committee for preparing the Work, is itself a proof of the small proportion which the Association bore to the whole body of Unitarians; and is well known to have been an inoperative form, which had no practical effect in dividing the chief Editor’s responsibility. The Version adopts, as a basis, the “Attempt towards revising our English Translation of the Greek Scriptures,” by Archbishop Newcome, Primate of Ireland; from which, including the smallest verbal variations, there are not, on an average, more than two deviations in a page; and it is a principle with the Editors, that these departures shall be noticed in the margin; so that any one, having the Improved Version in his hand, has the Archbishop’s Revision also before him. How far this translation has authority with Unitarians, may perhaps be judged of from one fact. The clergymen who are holding up this work to the pious horror of their hearers are repeating charges against it, long ago preferred by Archbishop Magee; who, in his time, reproduced them from Dr. Nares, the Regius Professor of modern history in the University of Oxford; who, again, borrowed no small part of his materials from a Review of the Version, in the Monthly Repository for 1809, by Dr. Carpenter, a distinguished Unitarian Divine. I do not mean that there