considerations abundantly explain what is found to have
here and there happened. But in fact this is not a mere conjecture of my
own. It is the reason assigned by Augustine for the erasure of these
twelve verses from many copies of the Gospel[611]. Ambrose, a quarter of
a century earlier, had clearly intimated that danger was popularly
apprehended from this quarter[612]: while Nicon, five centuries later,
states plainly that the mischievous tendency of the narrative was the
cause why it had been expunged from the Armenian version[613].
Accordingly, just a few Greek copies are still to be found mutilated in
respect of those nine verses only. But in fact the indications are not a
few that all the twelve verses under discussion did not by any means
labour under the same degree of disrepute. The first three (as I shewed
at the outset) clearly belong to a different category from the last
nine,--a circumstance which has been too much overlooked.

The Church in the meantime for an obvious reason had made choice of St.
John vii. 37-viii. 12--the greater part of which is clearly descriptive
of what happened at the Feast of Tabernacles--for her Pentecostal
lesson: and judged it expedient, besides omitting as inappropriate to
the occasion the incident of the woman taken in adultery, to ignore also
the three preceding verses;--making the severance begin, in fact, as far
back as the end of ch. vii. 52. The reason for this is plain. In this
way the allusion to a certain departure at night, and return early next
morning (St. John vii. 53: viii. 1), was avoided, which entirely marred
the effect of the lection as the history of a day of great and special
solemnity,--'the great day of the Feast.' And thus it happens that the
gospel for the day of Pentecost was made to proceed directly from
'Search and look: for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet,' in ch. vii.
52,--to 'Then spake Jesus unto them, saying, I am the light of the
world,' in ch. viii. 12; with which it ends. In other words, an omission
which owed its beginning to a moral scruple was eventually extended for
a liturgical consideration; and resulted in severing twelve verses of
St. John's Gospel--ch. vii. 53 to viii. 11--from their lawful context.

We may now proceed to the consideration of my second proposition, which
is

(2) _That by the very construction of her Lectionary, the Church in her
corporate capacity and official character has solemnly recognised the
narrative in qu