in their copies: and thus they vouch for their genuineness. For
none will doubt that, had they regarded them as a spurious accretion to
the inspired page, they would have said so plainly. Nor can it be denied
that if in their corporate capacity they had disallowed these twelve
verses, such an authoritative condemnation would most certainly have
resulted in the perpetual exclusion from the Sacred Text of the part of
these verses which was actually adopted as a Lection. What stronger
testimony on the contrary can be imagined to the genuineness of any
given portion of the everlasting Gospel than that it should have been
canonized or recognized as part of Inspired Scripture by the collective
wisdom of the Church in the third or fourth century?

And no one may regard it as a suspicious circumstance that the present
Pentecostal lection has been thus maimed and mutilated in respect of
twelve of its verses. There is nothing at all extraordinary in the
treatment which St. John vii. 37-viii. 12 has here experienced. The
phenomenon is even of perpetual recurrence in the Lectionary of the
East,--as will be found explained below[614].

Permit me to suppose that, between the Treasury and Whitehall, the
remote descendant of some Saxon thane occupied a small tenement and
garden which stood in the very middle of the ample highway. Suppose
further, the property thereabouts being Government property, that the
road on either side of this estate had been measured a hundred times,
and jealously watched, ever since Westminster became Westminster. Well,
an act of Parliament might no doubt compel the supposed proprietor of
this singular estate to surrender his patrimony; but I submit that no
government lawyer would ever think of setting up the plea that the owner
of that peculiar strip of land was an impostor. The man might have no
title-deeds to produce, to be sure; but counsel for the defendant would
plead that neither did he require any. 'This man's title' (counsel would
say) 'is--occupation for a thousand years. His evidences are--the
allowance of the State throughout that long interval. Every procession
to St. Stephen's--every procession to the Abbey--has swept by
defendant's property--on this side of it and on that,--since the days of
Edward the Confessor. And if my client refuses to quit the soil, I defy
you--except by violence--to get rid of him.'

In this way then it is that the testimony borne to these verses by the
Lectionary of t