[3] Bp. Ellicott remonstrated with for his unfair method of procedure.

I should enter at once on an examination of your Reply, but that I am constrained at the outset to remonstrate with you on the exceeding unfairness of your entire method of procedure. Your business was to make it plain to the public that you have dealt faithfully with the Deposit: have strictly fulfilled the covenant into which you entered twelve years ago with 373 the Convocation of the Southern Province: have corrected only plain and clear errors. Instead of this, you labour to enlist vulgar prejudice against me:—partly, by insisting that I am for determining disputed Readings by an appeal to the Textus Receptus,—which (according to you) I look upon as faultless:—partly, by exhibiting me in disagreement with Lachmann, Tischendorf and Tregelles. The irrelevancy of this latter contention,—the groundlessness of the former,—may not be passed over without a few words of serious remonstrance. For I claim that, in discussing the Greek Text, I have invariably filled my pages as full of Authorities for the opinions I advocate, as the limits of the page would allow. I may have been tediously demonstrative sometimes: but no one can fairly tax me with having shrunk from the severest method of evidential proof. To find myself therefore charged with mere denunciation,⁸⁵¹⁸⁵¹P. 40.—with substituting strong expressions of individual opinion for arguments,⁸⁵²⁸⁵²Ibid.—and with attempting to cut the cord by reckless and unverified assertions, (p. 25,)—astonishes me. Such language is in fact even ridiculously unfair.

The misrepresentation of which I complain is not only conspicuous, but systematic. It runs through your whole pamphlet: is admitted by yourself at the close,—(viz. at p. 77,)—to be half the sum of your entire contention. Besides cropping up repeatedly,⁸⁵³⁸⁵³As at p. 4, and p. 12, and p. 13, and p. 19, and p. 40. it finds deliberate and detailed expression when you reach the middle of your essay,—viz. at p. 41: where, with reference to certain charges which I not only bring against codices א b c l, but laboriously substantiate by a free appeal to the contemporary evidence of Copies, Versions, and Fathers,—you venture to express yourself concerning me as follows:—

To attempt to sustain such charges by a rough comparison of these ancient authorities with the Textus Receptus, and to measure the degree of their depravation by the amount of their divergence from such a text as we have shown this Received Text really to be, is to trifle with the subject of sacred Criticism.—p. 41.

You add:—

Until the depravation of these ancient Manuscripts has been demonstrated in a manner more consistent with the recognized principles of Criticism, such charges as those to which we allude must be regarded as expressions of passion, or prejudice, and set aside by every impartial reader as assertions for which no adequate evidence has yet been produced.—pp. 41-2.