eptance, and does justify us in
strongly pleading that a version of such a text, if faithfully executed,
should, for the very truth's sake, be publicly read in our Churches.

That the Revised Version has been faithfully executed, will I hope be
shown fully and clearly in the succeeding chapter. For the present my
care has been to show that the text of which it is a version, and which I
have called the Revisers' Text because it underlies their revision, and,
as such, has been published by the Oxford University Press, is in my
judgement the best balanced text that has appeared in this country. I
have mentioned with it (p. 63) the closely similar text of the well-known
Professor Nestle, but as I have not gone through the laborious task of
comparing the text, verse by verse, with that of the Revisers, I speak
only in reference to our own country. I have compared the two texts in
several crucial and important passages--such for example as St. John i.
18--and have found them identical. Bishop Westcott, I know, a short time
before his lamented death, expressed to the Committee of the Bible
Society his distinct approval of their adopting for future copies of the
Society's Greek Testament Professor Nestle's text, as published by the
Wurtemberg Bible Society.

I have now, I trust, fairly shown the independence of the Revisers' Text,
and have, not without reason, complained of my friend Provost Salmon's
estimate of its dependence on the text and earnestly exerted influence of
Dr. Hort and Dr. Westcott. Of course, as I have shown, there is, and
must be, much that is identical in the two texts; but, to fall back on
statistics, there are, I believe, more than two hundred places in which
the two texts differ, and in nearly all of them--if I may venture to
express my own personal opinion--the reading of the Revisers' Text is
critically to be preferred. Most of these two hundred places seem to be
precisely places in which the principles adopted by Westcott and Hort
need some corrective modifications. Greatly as I reverence the unwearied
patience, the exhaustive research, and the critical sagacity of these two
eminent, and now lamented, members of our former Company, I yet cannot
resist the conviction that Dr. Salmon in his interesting Criticism of the
Text of the New Testament has successfully indicated three or more
particulars which must cause some arrest in our final judgement on the
text of Westcott and Hort.

In the first