The following pages comprise an humble yet earnest attempt to revive among the countrymen of Bentley and Mill some interest in a branch of Biblical learning which, for upwards of a century, we have tacitly abandoned to continental scholars. The criticism of the text of Holy Scripture, though confessedly inferior in point of dignity and importance to its right interpretation, yet takes precedence of it in order of time: for how can we consistently proceed to investigate the sense of the Sacred Volume, till we have done our utmost to ascertain its precise words?

Now to whatever cause we may attribute this strange and scarcely creditable neglect on the part of English Divines, it certainly cannot arise from a paucity of unwrought materials, or exhaustion of the subject. On this point, however, in the room of any statement of my own, I will lay before the reader the ingenuous confession of one of the highest living authorities on Biblical Criticism, in one of the most recent of his publications. “Ut enim dicam quod res est, ex omnibus qui collati sunt codices, soli illi Alexandrinus [A], Ephraem. Syri [C], Cantabrigiensis [D], Dublinensis [Z], Sangallensis [Δ] et Dresdensis [G. Paul.] ita sunt excussi, ut quid scriptum singulis locis teneant quid non, scias” (Scholz, Commemoration Address at Bonn, 1845, p. 2).