ed 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. 2.

Numerous as were the heresies of the first two or three centuries of the
Christian era, they almost all agreed in this;--that they involved a
denial of the eternal Godhead of the Son of Man: denied that He is
essentially very and eternal God. This fundamental heresy found itself
hopelessly confuted by the whole tenor of the Gospel, which nevertheless
it assailed with restless ingenuity: and many are the traces alike of
its impotence and of its malice which have survived to our own times. It
is a memorable circumstance that it is precisely those very texts which
relate either to the eternal generation of the Son,--to His
Incarnation,--or to the circumstances of His Nativity,--which have
suffered most severely, and retain to this hour traces of having been in
various ways tampered with. I do not say that Heretics were the only
offenders here. I am inclined to suspect that the orthodox were as much
to blame as the impugners of the Truth. But it was at least with a pious
motive that the latter tampered with the Deposit. They did but imitate
the example set them by the assailing party. It is indeed the calamitous
consequence of extravagances in one direction that they are observed
ever to beget excesses in the opposite quarter. Accordingly the piety of
the primitive age did not think it wrong to fortify the Truth by the
insertion, suppression, or substitution of a few words in any place from
which danger was apprehended. In this way, I am persuaded, many an
unwarrantable 'reading' is to be explained. I do not mean that 'marginal
glosses have frequently found their way into the text':--that points to
a wholly improbable account of the matter. I mean, that expressions
which seemed to countenance heretical notions, or at least which had
been made a bad use of by evil men, were deliberately falsified. But I
must not further anticipate the substance of the next chapter.

The men who first systematically depraved the text of Scriptur