And now I may resume and proceed.
I say then that it is an adequate, as well as a singularly satisfactory explanation of the greater part of those gross depravations of Scripture which admit of no legitimate excuse, to attribute them, however remotely, to those licentious free-handlers of the text who are declared by their contemporaries to have falsified, mutilated, interpolated, and in whatever other way to have corrupted the Gospel; whose blasphemous productions of necessity must once have obtained a very wide circulation: and indeed will never want some to recommend and uphold them.

What with those who like Basilides and his followers invented a Gospel of their own:--what with those who with the Ebionites and the Valentinians interpolated and otherwise perverted one of the four Gospels until it suited their own purposes:--what with those who like Marcion shamefully maimed and mutilated the inspired text:--there must have been a large mass of corruption festering in the Church throughout the immediate post-Apostolic age.

But even this is not all.

There were those who like Tatian constructed Diatessarons, or attempts to weave the fourfold narrative into one,--'Lives of Christ,' so to speak;--and productions of this class were multiplied to an extraordinary extent, and as we certainly know, not only found their way into the remotest corners of the Church, but established themselves there.

And will any one affect surprise if occasionally a curious scholar of those days was imposed upon by the confident assurance that by no means were those many sources of light to be indiscriminately rejected, but that there must be some truth in what they advanced?
In a singularly uncritical age, the seductive simplicity of one reading,--the interesting fullness of another,--the plausibility of a thirds--was quite sure to recommend its acceptance amongst those many eclectic recensions which were constructed by long since forgotten Critics, from which the most depraved and worthless of our existing texts and versions have been derived.
Emphatically condemned by Ecclesiastical authority, and hopelessly outvoted by the universal voice of Christendom, buried under fifteen centuries, the corruptions I speak of survive at the present day chiefly in that little handful of copies which, calamitous to relate, the school of Lachmann and Tischendorf and Tregelles look upon as oracular: and in conformity with which many scholars are for refashioning the Evangelical text under the mistaken title of 'Old Readings.' And now to proceed with my argument.
Sec.