The Confusion of Two Texts.

It was urged at the Opera-house meeting, with what at the time I thought some plausibility, that even though our school teachers were not qualified to teach religion they could at least impart such a verbal knowledge of the Bible on the week days as the church could spiritualise on Sundays. Luther's opinion was that "whoso layeth a good foundation and is a substantial Textman—that is, he that is well grounded in the Text, the same hath whereupon he surely may keep footing and runneth not lightly into error"; but the mockery here would be that the more faithfully the luckless pupil had learned this mutilated version, the greater the certainty of error in passage after passage. The verbal knowledge acquired during the week will be of a different text from that in use on the Sunday, the child's mind will be distracted between the two; instead even of accurate learning page 8 by rote, slovenly and slipshod habits will be fostered, and he will inevitably be encouraged to regard the letter of the Scripture as a thing to be played fast and loose with—a result which I should have supposed the supporters of the present agitation would have been the last to desire.

To sum up : the proposal to introduce this text-book is