was nothing but reproduction of the original Reviewer’s materials throughout all these steps; if it were so, I should be ashamed to call that venerable man my friend: fresh objections were added at every stage; and, by Archbishop Magee, a mass of abuse the most coarse, and misrepresentation the most black; repeated still by unsuspecting and unlearned admirers, who find it easier to acquire from him his aptitudes for calumny than his acuteness in criticism. But the principal objections to the Improved Version were certainly anticipated by Dr. Carpenter, who furnished a list of unacknowledged deviations from Newcome’s revision, and from Griesbach’s and the Received Texts;—who censured the whole system of departure from that text, which seemed to be adopted as a standard; the license allowed to conjectural emendation; the preference of Newcome’s to the authorized version as a basis; the introduction of any doctrinal notes; and, what is especially to our present purpose, who vindicated, from the suspicion of spuriousness, the initial chapters of St. Luke’s Gospel, and consented to part with those of St. Matthew’s, only because at variance with the authority of the third Evangelist. From the armoury, therefore, of our own church, are stolen the very weapons, wherewith now, amid taunts of sacerdotal derision, we are to be driven as intruders from the fair fields of learning. For myself, when the learned labours of Dissenters are ridiculed, and the “defective scholarship” of heretics affirmed, by the privileged clergy of the established church, I always think of the Universities,—those venerable seats of instruction, from which Nonconformists must be excluded. The precious food of knowledge is first locked up; the key is hung beyond our reach; and then the starvelings must be laughed at, when they sink and fall. But so is it always with unjust power; the habit of injury begets the propensity to scorn.[61]