THE REVISION REVISED PDF download

The revision revised

THE REVISION REVISED

Book’s Preface

The ensuing three Articles from the “Quarterly Review,”—(wrung out of me by the publication [May 17th, 1881] of the “Revision” of our “Authorized Version of the New Testament,”)—appear in their present form in compliance with an amount of continuous solicitation that they should be separately published, which it would have been alike unreasonable and ungracious to disregard.

I was not prepared for it.

It has caused me—as letter after letter has reached my hands—mixed feelings; has revived all my original disinclination and regret.

For, gratified as I cannot but feel by the reception my labors have met with,—(and only the Author of my being knows what an amount of antecedent toil is represented by the ensuing pages,)—

I yet deplore more heartily than I can express, the injustice done to the cause of Truth by handling the subject in this fragmentary way, and by exhibiting the evidence for what is most certainly true, in such a very incomplete form.

A systematic Treatise is an indispensable condition for securing cordial assent to the view for which I mainly contend.

The cogency of the argument lies entirely in the cumulative character of the proof.

 It requires to be demonstrated by induction from a large collection of particular instances, as well as by the complex exhibition of many converging lines of evidence, that the testimony of one small group of documents, or rather, of one particular manuscript,—(namely the Vatican Codex B, which, for some [x] unexplained reason, it is just now the fashion to regard with superstitious deference,)—is the reverse of trustworthy.

Nothing in fact but a considerable Treatise will ever effectually break the yoke of that iron tyranny to which the excellent Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol and his colleagues have recently bowed