An Anachronism and an Outrage

not to be entertained or tolerated for a moment. Compiled sixty years ago, before the dawn of the modern Biblical criticism, which a religious paper recently termed the greatest event in the history of the church since the Reformation; teeming with statements which that criticism and natural science between them have utterly exploded, and many of which the most competent champions in this agitation have no faith in themselves; avowedly incomplete and fragmentary; teeming with allusions which in contemporary literature we should stigmatise as indecencies, and which, above all things, should be kept from the imagination of childhood; teeming with indecencies of the editor's own manufacture in the shape of wanton and senseless outrages upon the beauty and majesty of our incomparable English Bible—this uncritical and unscholarly book, this antiquated deformity which dropped unfinished from the hands of a clumsy and profane botcher two generations ago—this is what we, a community with some pretensions to enlightenment, are asked, without adding or subtracting a line or a letter—as though we had received it from a second Sinai—to authorise and establish for the moulding of our children's education upon the deepest and most sacred of subjects.

What is the meaning of this preposterous request? It means