Whitby was a conservative Protestant theologian whose basic view was that even though God certainly would not prevent errors from creeping into scribal copies of the New Testament, at the same time he would never allow the text to be corrupted (i.e., altered) to the point that it could not adequately achieve its divine aim and purpose. And so he laments, “I GRIEVE therefore and am vexed that I have found so much in Mill’s Prolegomena which seems quite plainly to render the standard of faith insecure, or at best to give others too good a handle for doubting.”
This contemporary reaction to Mill's Apparatus is notably similar to the modern Apologetic thinking on Biblical criticism. Essentially, it is a belief that God breathed new life into the 16th-century Erasmus and Stephanus versions of the NT, correcting the tens of thousands of human errors of the early church.
