r by the
oldest documents generally, but only by a few of them,--two, three, or
more of the oldest documents being observed as a rule to yield
conflicting testimony, (which in this subject-matter is in fact
contradictory). In this way the oldest witnesses nearly always refute
one another, and indeed dispose of one another's evidence almost as
often as that evidence is untrustworthy. 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 condemn