Respecting the sacred autographs, their fate or their continued existence, he seems to have had no information, and to have entertained no curiosity: they had simply passed by and were out of his reach.

Had it not been for the diversities of copies in all the Gospels on other points (he writes) he should not have ventured to object to the authenticity of a certain passage (Matt.xix.

19) on internal grounds: "But now," saith he, "great in truth has become the diversity of copies, be it from the negligence of certain scribes, or from the evil daring of some who correct what is written, or from those who in correcting add or take away what they think fit."' This is respecting the MSS.

of one region only, and now for another [Endnote 328:2]: 'It is no less true to fact than paradoxical in sound, that the worst corruptions to which the New Testament has ever been subjected, originated within a hundred years after it was composed; that Irenaeus and the African Fathers and the whole Western, with a portion of the Syrian Church, used far inferior manuscripts to those employed by Stunica, or Erasmus, or Stephens thirteen centuries later, when moulding the Textus Receptus.' Possibly this is an exaggeration, but no one will maintain that it is a very large exaggeration of the facts.
I proceed to give a few examples which serve to bring out the antiquity of the text.

And first from Irenaeus.
There is a very remarkable passage in the work Against Heresies [Endnote 329:1], bearing not indeed directly upon the Gospels, but upon another book of the New Testament, and yet throwing so much light upon the condition of the text in Irenaeus' time that it may be well to refer to it here.