So then, in brief, the Fathers are in a conspiracy to mislead: Creeds and Councils encumber the sense: Modern Commentators are not to be trusted: the comparison of Scripture with Scripture, except it be "of the same age and the same authors," "will tend rather to confuse than to elucidate:" (p. 383:) "Learning obscures," and an accurate appreciation of the meaning of the text is "no good!"--"When the _meaning of Greek words_ is once known[223], the young student has almost _all the real materials which are possessed by the greatest Biblical scholar_, in the book itself." (p. 384.) In a word, (as Dr. Moberly has had the manliness to remark,)--"It simply comes to this: A little Greek, (not too much,) and a strong self-relying imagination, and you may interpret Holy Scripture as well as--Mr. Jowett!" (p. lxii.) ... Benighted himself, the unhappy author of this Essay is so apprehensive lest a ray of light from Heaven shall break in upon one of his disciples,--even sideways, as it were, from the margin of the Bible,--that he carefully prohibits "the indiscriminate use of parallel passages" as "useless and uncritical." ... Yet may one not _with discrimination_ refer to the margin?--Better not! "No good!" (p. 393.) replies the Oracle. "Even the critical use of parallel passages is _not without danger_." (p. 383.) ... O shame! And all this from a College Tutor and Lecturer on Divinity! _this_ from one entrusted with the care of educating young men! _this_ from a Regius Professor of Greek[224]! Mr. Jowett congratulates himself that "Biblical criticism has made two great steps onward,--at the time of the Reformation, and _in our own day_." But his notion is amply refuted by the known facts of the case: for when he adds,--"The diffusion of a critical spirit in History and Literature is affecting the criticism of the Bible in our own day in a manner not unlike the burst of intellectual life in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries;" (p. 340;) he clearly requires to be reminded that the success of the Divinity of the Reformation was owing to the grand appeal then made to _the Patristic writings_. So far then as any of ourselves are resorting to _those_ sources of information, there may be a faint resemblance _in kind_ between the spirit which animates us, and that which wrought so nobly in the Fathers of our spiritual freedom,--Cranmer and Ridley and the other learned and holy men who revised our Offices. But if "_German_ Commentators" and _their_ method be supposed to be the ideals to which the age is tending, _then_ the Theology of the middle of the nineteenth century stands in marked _contrast_ to what prevailed in the middle of the sixteenth; and our spirit is _the very reverse of theirs_.--But I hasten on.