[1] Preliminary Statement.

You may be quite sure that I examined your pamphlet as soon as it appeared, with attention. I have since read it through several times: and—I must add—with ever-increasing astonishment. First, because it is so evidently the production of one who has never made Textual Criticism seriously his study. Next, because your pamphlet is no refutation whatever of my two Articles. You flout me: you scold me: you lecture me. But I do not find that you ever answer me. You reproduce the theory of Drs. Westcott and Hort,—which I claim to have demolished.⁸⁴⁷⁸⁴⁷See above, pages 235 to 366. You seek to put me down by flourishing in my face the decrees of Lachmann, Tischendorf and Tregelles,—which, as you are well aware, I entirely disallow. Denunciation, my lord Bishop, is not Argument; neither is Reiteration, Proof. And then,—Why do you impute to me opinions which I do not hold? and charge me with a method of procedure of which I have never been guilty? Above all, why do you seek to prejudice the question at issue between us by importing irrelevant matter which can only impose upon the ignorant and mislead the unwary? Forgive my plainness, but really you are so conspicuously unfair,—and at the same time so manifestly unacquainted, 371 (except at second-hand and only in an elementary way,) with the points actually under discussion,—that, were it not for the adventitious importance attaching to any utterance of yours, deliberately put forth at this time as Chairman of the New Testament body of Revisers, I should have taken no notice of your pamphlet.