III. Thereupon, a pretence was set up in many quarters, (_but only by the Revisionists and their friends_,) that all my labour hitherto had been thrown away, because I had omitted to disprove the principles on which this “New Greek Text” is founded. I flattered myself indeed that quite enough had been said to make it logically certain that the underlying “Textual Theory” _must be_ worthless. But I was not suffered to cherish this conviction in quiet. It was again and again cast in my teeth that I had not yet grappled with Drs. Westcott and Hort’s “arguments.” “Instead of condemning _their Text_, why do you not disprove _their Theory_?” It was tauntingly insinuated that I knew better than to cross swords with the two Cambridge Professors. This reduced me to the necessity of either leaving it to be inferred from my silence that I had found Drs. Westcott and Hort’s “arguments” unanswerable; or else of coming forward with their book in my hand, and demonstrating that in their solemn pages an attentive reader finds himself encountered by nothing but a series of unsupported assumptions: that their (so called) “Theory” is in reality nothing else but a weak effort of the Imagination: that the tissue which these accomplished scholars have been thirty years in elaborating, proves on inspection to be as flimsy and as worthless as any spider’s web. I made it my business in consequence to expose, somewhat in detail, (in a third Article, which appeared in the “Quarterly Review” for April 1882), the absolute absurdity,—(I use the word advisedly)—of “WESTCOTT AND HORT’S NEW TEXTUAL THEORY;”(7) and I now respectfully commend those 130 pages to the attention of candid and unprejudiced readers. It were idle to expect to convince any others. We have it on good authority (Dr. Westcott’s) that “he who has long pondered over a train of Reasoning, _becomes unable to detect its weak points_.”(8) A yet stranger phenomenon is, that those who have once committed themselves to an erroneous Theory, seem to be incapable of opening their eyes to the untrustworthiness of the fabric they have erected, even when it comes down in their sight, like a child’s house built with playing-cards,—and presents to every eye but their own the appearance of a shapeless ruin. § 1. Two full years have elapsed since the first of these Essays was published; and my Criticism—for the best of reasons—remains to this hour unanswered. The public has been assured indeed, (in the course of some hysterical remarks by Canon Farrar(9)), that “the ‘Quarterly Reviewer’ can be refuted as fully as he desires as soon as any scholar has the leisure to answer him.” The “Quarterly Reviewer” can afford to wait,—if the Revisers can. But they are reminded that it is no answer to one who has demolished their master’s “Theory,” for the pupils to keep on reproducing fragments of it; and by their mistakes and exaggerations, to make both themselves and him, ridiculous.