lties to persons of distinction, who
possibly had never heard of those difficulties before; and even to
represent the Interrogatories which suggested them as originating with
themselves. I offer this only in the way of suggestion, and am not
concerned to defend it. The only point I am concerned to establish is that
Jerome is here a _translator_, not an original author: in other words,
that it is _Eusebius_ who here speaks, and not Jerome. For a critic to
pretend that it is in _any_ sense the testimony of Jerome which we are
here presented with; that Jerome is one of those Fathers "who, even though
they copied from their predecessors, were yet competent to transmit the
record of a fact,"(95)--is entirely to misunderstand the case. The man who
translates,--not adopts, but _translates_,--_the problem_ as well as its
solution: who deliberately asserts that it emanated from a Lady inhabiting
the furthest extremity of Gaul, who nevertheless was demonstrably not its
author: who goes on to propose as hers question after question _verbatim
as he found them written in the pages of Eusebius_; and then resolves them
one by one _in the very language of the same Father_:--such a writer has
clearly conducted us into a region where his individual responsibility
quite disappears from sight. We must hear no more about Jerome, therefore,
as a witness against the genuineness of the concluding verses of S. Mark's
Gospel.

On the contrary. Proof is at hand that Jerome held these verses to be
genuine. The proper evidence of this is supplied by the fact that he gave
them a place in his revision of the old Latin version of the Scriptures.
If he had been indeed persuaded of their absence from "_almost all the
Greek codices_," does any one imagine that he would have suffered them to
stand in the Vulgate? If he had met with them in "_scarcely any copies of
the Gospel_"--do men really suppose that he would yet have retained them?
To believe this would, again, be to forget what was the known practice of
this Father; who, because he found the expression "without a cause"
({~GREEK SMALL LETTER EPSILON~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER IOTA WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER KAPPA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ETA WITH OXIA~},--S. Matth. v. 22,) only "in certain of his codices," but not "in the
true ones," _omitted_ it from the Vulgate. Because, however, he read
"righteousness" (where we read "alms") in S. Matth. vi. 1, he exhibits
"_justitiam_" in his revision of the old Lati