The " quadringenary of the open English Bible "—The Times
is my authority for a term unknown to the Oxford English Dictionary—raises the old question of how far the Fnglish Bible is read today. There is a common impressiod that, broadly speaking, it is not. A distinguished preacher in an address the other day observed : " You will remember the story—no, you won't, because it's in the Bible, and you don't read that." He had some warrant for his statement, for he mentioned just afterwards an undergraduate who, after an unwonted appearance at church, asked with considerable interest " Who was that good Samaritan the parson was talking about ? " But facts are as important as impressions, and one or two figures I have obtained are significant. The Bible as Literature, published last year by Messrs. Heinemann at the substantial price of Jos. 6d., could only be regarded as an experiment, and a dubious one at that. But no fewer than 125,000 copies have been sold, and the figure is mounting steadily. Then the British and Foreign Bible Society dis- posed last year of not much fewer than a million Bibles in the British Isles alone, that figure being a substantial increase over previous years. People, it may be assumed, who buy a Bible buy it to read at any rate occasionally (though it by no means follows that a Bible, or any other book, given as a present is read), so that though family reading of the Bible has no doubt greatly diminished, and so has the number of people who hear portions of it read in church, the suggestion that " no one reads the Bible today " clearly falls far short of fact.
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