earth'! and he may well desire to do something to pay his debt to
popular education before he finally departs, and to serve it, if he can,
in that point where its need is sorest, where he has always said its
need was sorest, and where, nevertheless, it is as sore still as when he
began saying this twenty years ago. Even if what he does cannot be of
service at once, owing to special prejudices and difficulties, yet these
prejudices and difficulties years are almost sure to dissipate, and the
work may be of service hereafter."

These wise, though rather melancholy, words occur in the Preface to a
little book called _A Bible Reading for Schools_, and in its fuller and
alternative title, _The Great Prophecy of Israel's Restoration, Arranged
and Edited for Young Learners_. Arnold, himself a constant and attentive
student of Holy Writ, "liked reading his Bible without being baffled by
unmeaningnesses." He complained that "the fatal thing about our version
is that it so often spoils a chapter in the Old Testament by making
sheer nonsense out of one or two verses, and so throwing the reader
out." He habitually used a Bible--a present from his godfather, John
Keble--"where the numbers of the chapters are marked at the side and do
not interpose a break between chapter and chapter; and where the
divisions of the verses, being numbered in like manner at the side of
the page, not in the body of the verse, and being numbered in very small
type, do not thrust themselves forcibly on the attention," and these
circumstances suggested the form of his _Bible Reading for Schools_. The
little book consists of the last twenty-seven chapters of Isaiah,
running on continuously, with some twenty pages of notes, and he thus
introduces it--

"At the very outset, the humbleness of what is professed in this little
book cannot be set forth too strongly. With the aim of enabling English