This is the phrase by which the American editor of the Expository Times characterizes the work of [288] Wellhausen in his volume of the Polychrome Bible. He is the head master of modern criticism, and it was but a just tribute to his leadership that he was selected as editor and translator of at least one book in this new Bible, notwithstanding his avowed infidelity. It would have been a piece of ingratitude for his pupils to have passed him by. But he is a little too arbitrary and radical to suit even the friends of this rainbow enterprise. The editor just mentioned speaks of his work in the following terms:

      Altogether the average reader is going to be amazed at the reckless slashing at the text with omissions and amendations merely conjectural, without the pretense of support from manuscript or versions, dictated sometimes by the translator's poetic taste, sometimes by his lack of taste. Such tampering by an editor with his author's text is contrary to all that the average reader is accustomed to hear about the textual critic's scrupulous respect for manuscript authority.

      As an instance of this slashing., he cites the omission from the nineteenth Psalm of the third verse: "There is no speech nor language; their voice is not heard," on the ground that it is "extremely prosaic." This is an example not only of reckless slashing, but of extreme want of taste on the part of Wellhausen. Joseph Addison, in his inimitable paraphrase of this noble Psalm, makes of this "prosaic" verse one of the most beautiful conceptions in the whole poem:

      It is my opinion, which I give for what it may be [289] worth, whether much or little, that this many-colored attempt to give the world a new Bible in place of the one which God gave us, is destined to be a more effective weapon for the overthrow of this pernicious criticism of which Wellhausen is the great apostle, than anything yet attempted by its most skillful foes.

[SEBC 288-290]