represented Mark to be; or (II) to insinuate to unlearned readers
that Basilides himself acknowledged Mark as well as Glaucias as the
interpreter of Peter. We can hardly suppose the first to have been
the intention, and we regret to be forced back upon the second, and
infer that the temptation to weaken the inferences from the appeal
of Basilides to the uncanonical Glaucias, by coupling with it the
allusion to Mark, was [unconsciously, no doubt] too strong for the
apologist.' [21:2]

Dr Westcott's honour may safely be left to take care of itself. It
stands far too high to be touched by insinuations like these. I only
call attention to the fact that our author has removed Dr Westcott's
inverted commas [22:1], and then founded on the passage so manipulated a
charge of unfair dealing, which could only be sustained in their
absence, and which even then no one but himself would have thought of.
I will not retort upon our author the charge of 'deliberate
falsification,' which he so freely levels at others, for I do not
believe that he had any such intention. The lesson suggested by this
highly characteristic passage is of another kind. It exemplifies the
elaborate looseness which pervades the critical portion of this book. It
illustrates the author's inability to look at things in a
straightforward way. It emphasizes more especially the suspicious temper
of the work, which makes it, as even a favourable reviewer has said,
'painfully sceptical'--a temper which must necessarily vitiate all the
processes of criticism, and which, if freely humoured elsewhere, would
render life intolerable and history impossible [22:2].

It is difficult to see what end the author proposed to attain by all
this literary browbeating. In the course of my examination I shall be
constrained to adopt many a view which has been denounced beforehand as