so much as
I anticipated to advance against our case. Longer examinations of this
important matter are doubtless impending, with all the interest
attaching to them and the judgements involved: but I beg now to offer my
acknowledgements for all the words of encouragement that have been
uttered.

Something however must be said in reply to an attack made in the
_Guardian_ newspaper on May 20, because it represents in the main the
position occupied by some members of an existing School. I do not linger
over an offhand stricture upon my 'adhesion to the extravagant claim of
a second-century origin for the Peshitto,' because I am content with the
companionship of some of the very first Syriac scholars, and with the
teaching given in an unanswered article in the _Church Quarterly Review_
for April, 1895. Nor except in passing do I remark upon a fanciful
censure of my account of the use of papyrus in MSS. before the tenth
century--as to which the reviewer is evidently not versed in information
recently collected, and described for example in Sir E. Maunde
Thompson's Greek and Latin Palaeography, or in Mr. F. G. Kenyon's Our
Bible and the Ancient Manuscripts, and in an article in the just
mentioned Review which appeared in October, 1894. These observations and
a large number of inaccuracies shew that he was at the least not posted
up to date. But what will be thought, when attention is drawn to the
fact that in a question whether a singular set of quotations from the
early Fathers refer to a passage in St. Matthew or the parallel one in
St. Luke, the peculiar characteristic of St. Matthew--'them that
persecute you'--is put out of sight, and both passages (taking the
lengthened reading of St. Matthew) are represented as having equally
only four clauses? And again, when quotations going on to the succeeding
verse in St. Matthew (v. 45) are stated dogmatically to have been
wrongly referred by me to that Evangelist? But as to the details of this
point in dispute, I beg to refer our readers to pp. 144-153 of the
present volume. The reviewer appears also to be entirely unacquainted
with the history of the phrase [Greek: monogenes Theos] in St. John i.
18, which, as may be read on pp. 215-218, was introduced by heretics and
harmonized with Arian tenets, and was rejected on the other side. That
some orthodox churchmen fell into the trap, and like those who in these
days are not aware of the pedigree and use of the phrase, employed it