Errata of the Protestant Bible: Or the Truth of the English Translations Examined (Classic Reprint)

Tkk life of Mr. Ward is greatly involved in obscurity, and though the editor had many difliculties to encounter in ascertaining its events; yet he is happy in beng enabled to gratify curiosity, by laying before the public some of the most interesting particulars concerning this extraordinary man they have been chiefly communicated by a gentleman in London. Thomas Ward was the son of a respectable farmer, and was born at Danby Castle, in the Moors of Yorkshire, on the 13th of A pril, 1652. The early part of his life passed away undistinguished from that of ordinary children, and nothing remarkable of him is. known until his fourteenth year, when we find him at Pickering School, giving the first indications of his genius, and excelling his brothers, of whom he was the eldest, in his taste and knowledge of the classics. Here he was initiated in the first principles of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy, in which sciences he became a gi-eat proficient. So much was his father pleased with his early propensity to learning, and the abilities which he discovered, that he determined to rescue him from the obscurity of a country life, and destined him for one of the learned professions. Young Ward was accordingly offered his choice to become a clergyman, a physician, or a lawyer ;but, with a mind already matured by study and thinking, he hesitated and at length declined his fathers offers. In the practice of the law, he observed there weie too many temptations to dishonesty, and he doubted his firmness to resist them. The profession of physic was repugnant to the delicacy of his feelings ;and, as a clergyman, he feared that he might contribute more to the destruction than the salvation of his fellow-man. Thus, perhaps, a too fastidious nicety in his conscience and ideas, left him without a calling, and he entered on the world with vry little prospects of a permanent
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