After his retirement from public service Thomson devoted himself to translating the Bible from the Greek and to other writings. And in this volume we can see his active mind absorbed in the work still in progress. This manuscript of the New Testament, totally in his hand, is extensively revised with cross-outs, interlinear additions and corrections, paste-over revisions, added leaves, etc. From the fact that many of these and other bits are accompanied by instructions as to a typesetter—“This note to go in” — “To go in at bottom” — “On the first leaf . . . in large capital letters”—and from the fact that in portions we have been able to check, the manuscript as so elaborately emended-to here matches with the printed version even unto the semicolons—we must judge thatthis was the manuscript actually submitted to Jane Aitken, daughter of Philadelphia’s Robert Aitken (the printer of the first Bible in English in America), who printed both the “Old Covenant” and “New Covenant” portions of Thomson’s Bible translation in 1808.

Hills states that Thomson “copied the manuscript four times,” but we can locate as extant only a partial O.T. at the American Bible Society and a set of both “Covenants” at Allegheny College that evidently represents a less developed stage of Thomson’s work, because it contains neither directions to the printer nor even, yet, the commentary footnotes present in our volume and in the printed version. Clearly, it would be both absorbing and instructive to compare this volume with those others—and with the copy of the printed version at the Philadelphia Library Company in which Thomson made notes hoping for a second edition! A monograph cries out, here.

Provenance: Charles Thomson; author’s gift to the Rev. David Jones, chaplain in the Continental Army throughout the Revolution in Gen. Anthony Wayne’s command; inherited by his son the Rev. Horatio Gates Jones, a founder of the Baptist Board of Foreign Missions and president of the board of trustees and later chancellor of the college at Lewisburg, Pa. (now Bucknell University); inherited by his son Horatio Gates Jones, Esq., a lawyer, Pennsylvania state representative, and historian. His gift to the Crozer Theological Seminary of Bucknell University; that seminary merged into the Colgate Rochester School of Theology; in the Library of the Colgate Rochester Crozer School of Theology. Deaccessioned.

•  On the Thomson/Aitken Bible, see: Hills, The English Bible in America, 153. On Thomson, see (for example): The Dictionary of American Biography (this article is actually quite moving), XVIII, 481–82. Mid-19th-century quarter morocco with marbled paper sides. The volume in very good condition, with the leather refurbished and the paper supple and untattered.