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Excerpt from Deliver Us From Evil: A Protest Against the Change in the Last Petition of the Lord's Prayer, Adopted in the Revised Version; A Letter to the Bishop of London
Early in this present year I was informed, to my extreme surprise and grief, that the Revisers of the Authorized Version had resolved to introduce an alteration of vital importance in the Lord's Prayer.
I find that they have issued the work with that alteration, substituting the evil one for evil in the closing petition. I observe, moreover, that the extreme gravity of the change is recognised by the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, who defends it in his speech addressed to the Upper House of Convocation on the 17th of this month.
Certainly no change likely to be adopted by men so learned, so high in the estimation of their fellow-christians, could be proposed which would produce a more general and lively feeling of astonish ment and pain - a change affecting the prayer which bears the emphatic designation of the Lord's Prayer, in which every Christian sums up his deepest and most earnest petitions, in which the Church recognises the model and law of her devotions.
Willing and ready as we are to accept the decisions of the Revisers on most points of pure scholarship. And theological learning, on such a point as this all must be anxious to know on what grounds the correctness and the necessity of this alteration can be maintained. For my own part, after repeated and earnest inquiry, and, I must add, after consultation with scholars of the highest eminence, I have arrived at the deliberate conviction that its correctness is, to say the least, exceedingly doubtful, and its adeption by the Revisers indefensible on the only admissible ground, that of necessity.
I will endeavour, with all possible brevity, to state the grounds on which this conviction rests.
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