several parties who had furnished from memory the same portions of the sacred texts had fallen into a great variety of different readings; and though most of them were of as little importance in themselves as the bulk of those which are paraded in the critical recensions of Mill, Griesbach, or Tischendorf, they became, from the obstinacy and folly of the men who contended about them, important differences, merely because they were differences.  Two reverend men of the synod, I remember, had a rather tough dispute as to whether it was twelve baskets full of fragments of the five loaves which the five thousand left, and seven baskets full of the seven loaves which the four thousand had left, or vice versa:  as also whether the words in John vi. 19 were “about twenty or five and twenty,” or “about thirty or five and thirty furlongs.”

To do the assembly justice, however, there was found an intense general earnestness and sincerity befitting the occasion, and an equally intense desire to obtain, as nearly as possible, the very words of the lost volume; only (as was also, alas! natural) vanity in some; in others, confidence in their strong impressions and in the accuracy of their memory; obstinacy and pertinacity in many more (all aggravated as usual by controversy),—­caused many odd embarrassments before the final adjustment was effected.

I was particularly struck with the varieties of reading which mere prejudices in favor of certain systems of theology occasioned in the several partisans of each.  No doubt the worthy men were generally unconscious of the influence of these prejudices; yet, somehow, the memory was seldom so dear in relation to those texts which told against them as in relation to those which told for them.  A certain Quaker had an impression that the words instituting the Eucharist were preceded by a qualifying expression, “And Jesus said to the twelve, Do this in remembrance of me”; while he could not exactly recollect whether or not the formula of “baptism” was expressed in the general terms some maintained it was.  Several Unitarians had a clear recollection, that in several places the authority of manuscripts, as estimated in Griesbaeh’s recension, was decidedly against the common reading; while the Trinitarians maintained that Griesbaeb’s recension in those instances had left that reading undisturbed.  An Episcopalian began to bare his doubts whether the usage in favor of the interchange of the words “bishop” and “presbyter” was so uniform as the Presbyterian and Independent maintained, and whether there was not a passage in which Timothy and Titus were expressly called “bishops.”  The Presbyterian and Independent had similar biases; and one gentleman, who was a strenuous advocate of the system of the latter, enforced one equivocal remembrance by saying, he could, as it were, distinctly see the very spot on the page before his mind’s eye.  Such tricks will imagination play with the memory, when preconception plays tricks with the imagination!