Excerpt from Criticism of the New Testament: St. Margaret's LectureEnglish theological science has to Show in the century now past. It was a complete science in itself, built up from the very foundation. Ten years ago the text and system of Westcott and Hort seemed to be in full possession of the field. It had of course opponents, but no serious rivals. To-day the situation is different. Still we may say that there is no fully elaborated system to compare with theirs; but important discoveries have been made which are thought in some quarters, and those not the least scientific, to affect the balance of the evidence as they had left it. There is a Spirit of enterprise and experiment abroad, which has nowhere as yet attained mature results, but which is actively at work, and the success of which remains to be seen.Westcott and Hort had made it clear that the two oldest families of texts are that which they called Neutral and that which they called Western. The Neutral is in the main the text of the two oldest (le. Fourth century) mss., the Vatican and the Sinaitic. The Western is the text mainly represented by the Latin Version, but really diffused throughout the Christian world.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.