ield no suitable example for treatment? Could no passage be
found in St. John's Gospel, where not without parallel, but to a
remarkable degree, extreme simplicity of language, even expressed in
alternative clauses, clothes soaring thought and philosophical
acuteness? True, that he quotes St. John v. 37 as an instance of
Conflation by the Codex Bezae which is anything but an embodiment of the
Traditional or 'Syrian' Text, and xiii. 24 which is similarly
irrelevant. Neither of these instances therefore fill up the gap, and
are accordingly not included in the selected eight. What can we infer
from this presentment, but that 'Conflation' is probably not of frequent
occurrence as has been imagined, but may indeed be--to admit for a
moment its existence--nothing more than an occasional incident? For
surely, if specimens in St. Matthew and St. John had abounded to his
hand, and accordingly 'Conflation' had been largely employed throughout
the Gospels, Dr. Hort would not have exercised so restricted, and yet so
round a choice.

2. But we must advance a step further. Dean Burgon as we have seen has
calculated the differences between B and the Received Text at 7,578, and
those which divide [Symbol: Aleph] and the Received Text as reaching
8,972. He divided these totals respectively under 2,877 and 3,455
omissions, 556 and 839 additions, 2,098 and 2,299 transpositions, and
2,067 and 2,379 substitutions and modifications combined. Of these
classes, it is evident that Conflation has nothing to do with Additions
or Transpositions. Nor indeed with Substitutions, although one of Dr.
Hort's instances appears to prove that it has. Conflation is the
combination of two (or more) different expressions into one. If
therefore both expressions occur in one of the elements, the Conflation
has been made beforehand, and a substitution then occurs instead of a
conflation. So in St. Luke xii. 18, B, &c, read [Greek: ton siton kai ta
agatha mou] which Dr. Hort[619] considers to be made by Conflation into
[Greek: ta genemata mou kai ta agatha mou], because [Greek: ta genemata
mou] is found in Western documents. The logic is strange, but as Dr.
Hort has claimed it, we must perhaps allow him to have intended to
include with this strange incongruity some though not many Substitutions
in his class of instances, only that we should like to know definitely
what substitutions were to be comprised in this class. For I shrewdly
suspect that there were actuall