He has taken up, as it were, at haphazard, the first standard that came to his hand; and, not unnaturally, this is found to be very much the standard of the present literary age, when both the mechanical and psychological conditions are quite different from those that prevailed at the beginning of the Christian era.

He has thus been led to make a number of assertions which will require a great deal of qualification.

The only sound and scientific method is to make an induction (if only a rough one) respecting the habit of early quotation generally, and then to apply it to the particular cases.
Here there will be three classes of quotation more or less directly in point: (1) the quotations from the Old Testament in the New; (2) the quotations from the Old Testament in the same early writers whose quotations from the New Testament are the point in question; (3) quotations from the New Testament, and more particularly from the Gospels, in the writers subsequent to these, at a time when the Canon of the Gospels was fixed and we can be quite sure that our present Gospels are being quoted.
This method of procedure however is not by any means so plain and straightforward as it might seem.

The whole subject of Old Testament quotations is highly perplexing.

Most of the quotations that we meet with are taken from the LXX version; and the text of that version was at this particular time especially uncertain and fluctuating.