[There are three enclosures included with this document.]

Dear Mr. McQuesten,

In the year 1611 the Authorized Version of the English Bible was published for the first time, and in the 1911 the tercentenary of the significant event will be celebrated throughout the English speaking world.

The Alberta Auxiliary of the Canadian Bible Society will join in the general celebration and on February 13, 1911, in the City of Calgary will hold an appropriate service in conjunction with its annual meeting. Meanwhile the Auxiliary is endeavouring to secure a specially good contribution to its funds for the year whereby to signalize the event. The Edmonton Branch of the Auxiliary desiring earnestly to aid in the plan is aiming at raising $1000.00. It is accordingly the intention of the Branch to have representatives of its Committee call on you for your contribution during the first week of January, 1911.

Should you prefer to respond in this way your contribution may be enclosed in the accompanying envelope and placed on the collection plate of your church on any Sunday during the interval.

[Enclosure #1:]

On February, 13^th, 1911, the Alberta Auxiliary of the Canadian Bible Society will celebrate the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the--[sic] publication of the Authorized Version of the English Bible, and is hoping that the event will be signalized by a greatly increased contribution to the funds for the year 1910-1911. You are respectfully requested to make your contribution for the year, which may be enclosed herein, as liberal as possible and thus manifest your gratitude for that wonderful version of the English Bible, which has been so long and widely used. Edmonton Branch contributed $497.00 last year, and this year is asked to endeavour to advance to $1000.00.

Name

Address

[Enclosure #2:]

"Who will deny that the uncommon beauty and marvellous English of the Protestant Bible is one of the strongholds of heresy in this country? It lives on the air like music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of church bells which the convert hardly knows how he can forgo. Nay, it is worshipped with a positive idolatry, in the extenuation of whose fanaticism its intrinsic beauty pleads availingly with the man of letters and the scholar. The memory of the dead passes into it; the potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. It is the representative of man’s best moments, and all there has been about him of the soft and gentle and pure and penitent and good, speak to him out of the pages of his Protestant Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed and controversy never soiled."

[Enclosure #3:]

Sir Robert Hart, G.C.M.G., Inspector-General of Customs in China from 1863 to 1908, wrote as follows on April 15^th, 1909, regretting his enforced absence from the Bible Society's annual meeting in Queens's Hall, London: "Of making of books there is no end, but there is only one Bible, and your Society is doing a work that can never be fully valued in preparing it in all languages for the use of all men, and in supplying missionaries with what they require for their growing work throughout the earth. You have made wonderful advances these last hundred years, and you will follow them up till every man possesses his own copy of the Scriptures in his own tongue, and what you do is at the bottom of every missionary effort, and rears walls around to protect and support the result of such labours. Our Lord's last promise was to be with His disciples to the end of the world, both in time and space, and His presence will accompany His Word to all the quarters you send it to. I admire the zeal with which you beat up recruits and push on the doings of this grand Society, and as I cannot be with you on May 5^th, may I say how much I value what you do-how much I realize its importance-and how much I feel that its effort will know no failure and will be more and more appreciated as time rolls on."

British and Foreign Bible Society, 146 Queen Victoria Street, London, E.C.