AN ABRIDGED BIBLE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19974, 16 June 1928, Page 7 (Supplement)

AN ABRIDGED BIBLE.

MANY INNOVATIONS. The Rev. Alexander Nairne, rcgius professor of divinity, Sir Arthur QuillerCouch, professor of English literature, and Mr. T. A. Glover, public orator at Cambridge University, are editing a new abridged edition of the Bible. Sir Arthur y.uiller-Couch says that at present the Bible is repellent as a book owing to the system of double columns, marginal references, and numbered verses. People 110 longer buy it. "We are," Sir Arthur added, considering altering it to a volume of 900 pages, dispensing with marginal notes and numbered verses, retaining Genesis, Exodus, and Deuteronomy, except the genealogical trees, deleting most of Leviticus and Numbers, greatly reducing Proverbs, separating the poetical from the historical section of Isaiah, merging the latter with Kingi., excluding Chronicles altogether, printing the Psalms and Job as free verse, retaining the whole of the New Testament, except a few epistles, and inserting between the Old and Aew Testaments the best parts of the Apo--01 Most of the innovations proposed by the editors of the new edition of the Ihble were incorporated in an edition of the Ulu Testament edited by the Rev. M. O. Glazebrook, canon of Ely. In this edition, which is entitled " The Layman s Old Testament," vain repetition is avoided, the order of the books is rearranged, poetrv is printed as poetry, and the printijig and binding are similar to those used iu an ordinary octavo volume.