Page:The Roman Breviary Bute 1908 - vol. 1.djvu/10

 work, and he cannot conceal from himself that when he did so, he did not fully realise either how vast a work it has proved to be, or how little he was himself fitted to execute it satisfactorily. He has bestowed a great deal of reading and investigation upon it, and he has enjoyed the advantage of a learned friend's revision; but at the moment of giving it to the public he feels anything but well content with it, and can only protest that it is his best, and that it is, in his judgment, better that the work should be done thus imperfectly than not at all.

In considering the work, the reader will please to understand that the following are the principles which have been followed. The book is a translation from the Latin, and where the original texts are Hebrew, Chaldee, or Greek, it is not these texts but the Breviary Latin rendering of them which is translated into English, the aim of the Translator having been merely to give a rendering, in as good, plain, manly, and idiomatic English as he could command, of the Latin Service-book of the Church. Accordingly, whenever the Latin has a distinct sense of its own as, for instance, in Ps. Ixxv. 5 that sense is given simply without any remark, and the divergence from the original is only pointed out in footnotes in a few cases where it appeared desirable to know both renderings in order to understand the context. Moreover, in the Psalter, and in a few other places, the Rev. James McSwiney, S.J., to whom the Trans lator has to acknowledge so many obligations, has been kind enough to bracket the words which are not, now, to be found in the Hebrew at all. In the case of a single word in Lam. iv. 7, Dr Gesenius rendering of the Hebrew is put in the text, and the literal translation of the Latin in a footnote.

In cases where the Latin is obscure, either in its rendering of the Scripture, or elsewhere, the original has been referred to when possible, in order to find what the Latin is probably intended to mean, and here the Translator has again to acknowledge his indebtedness to the learned Jesuit already named, for his assistance in a work for which the Translator's own knowledge only most imperfectly qualifies him.

It will be gathered from the above that the Translator has not followed any existing version exactly in the rendering of the Holy Scripture. The version, or rather series of versions for there are