"In the last decades of his life Bentley undertook two ambitious projects that had an immense effect on the future of scholarship, namely editions of the New Testament and of Homer ... [H]e would not present once again the received text with a farrago of readings from manuscripts of all ages, but would try to restore the oldest knowable text. This was in his opinion the text of the fourth century A.D. at the time of the Council of Nicaea. He proposed to restrict himself to the oldest Greek manuscripts, supplemented by the oldest manuscripts of the Vulgate, of the ancient Oriental versions, and of the earliest quotations in the writings of the Church Fathers. The edition was to become, as Bentley said, "a Charter, a Magna Carta to the whole Christian church". He collected material from manuscripts for more than twenty years, zealously assisted, among other fellow labourers, by the French Benedictines. Although personal difficulties, as well as the complexity of the problems, prevented Bentley from completing and publishing his edition, his project anticipated by a whole century the work of Lachmann and others."