Protestant Exiles from France/Volume 2 - Book Third - Chapter 12 - Section XII
Le Cene.
Charles Le Cene was a native of Caen in Normandy, born in 1647. He studied for the ministry of the Protestant Church at Sedan, Geneva, and Saumur. He was ordained at Caen in 1672, and became the pasteur of Honfleur, where he officiated for ten years. In 1682 his talents procured for him the nomination to be one of the pasteurs of Charenton; but his admission was barred by an accusation of heterodoxy, and the case was not concluded at the date of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He then became a refugee in Holland, where he openly declared himself to be an Arminian. In 1684 he wrote a treatise on the theme that “man has the natural power to repent, to become virtuous, and to save himself.” In 1685 he produced a book “On conversion, free-will, and original sin, in connection with Le Clerc’s Essay on Predestination.” He visited England, but did not obtain a charge among the refugees, partly because he was suspected of Socinianism. Ultimately he took up his residence in London, where he died in 1703. In 1696 he issued a proposal for a new translation of the Bible into French [Projet d’une nouvelle version Françoise de la Bible]. His son, Michel Le Cene, probably inherited the manuscript of a new translation. He re-issued his father’s proposal, with the title, “An Essay for a New Translation of the Bible, shewing that there is a necessity for a new translation” (2d edition, London, 1727). He brought out the translation in 1741 at Amsterdam, in 2 vols, folio. The Synod of La Brille condemned this version, and called (unsuccessfully) upon the civil powers to suppress it. The Rev. B. H. Cowper says of Le Cene’s Bible, “It is justly charged with culpable inaccuracy and gross misrepresentation; it is perhaps one of the most remarkable perversions of the sacred text that has ever been made public.” (See Darling’s “Cyclopedia Bibliographica,” and Cowper’s “Memoir in the Imperial Dictionary of Biography.”)