e commonly represented
as bearing hostile testimony to the last Twelve Verses of S. Mark's
Gospel; and they have been easily reduced to _one_. Three of them,
(Hesychius, Jerome, Victor,) prove to be echoes, not voices. The remaining
two, (Gregory of Nyssa and Severus,) are neither voices nor echoes, but
merely _names_: GREGORY OF NYSSA having really no more to do with this
discussion than Philip of Macedon; and "Severus" and "Hesychius"
representing one and the same individual. Only by a Critic seeking to
mislead his reader will any one of these five Fathers be in future cited
as witnessing against the genuineness of S. Mark xvi. 9-20. Eusebius is
the solitary witness who survives the ordeal of exact inquiry.(117) But,

I. EUSEBIUS, (as we have seen), instead of proclaiming his distrust of
this portion of the Gospel, enters upon an elaborate proof that its
contents are not inconsistent with what is found in the Gospels of S.
Matthew and S. John. His testimony is reducible to two innocuous and
wholly unconnected propositions: the first,--That there existed in his day
a vast number of copies in which the last chapter of S. Mark's Gospel
ended abruptly at ver. 8; (the correlative of which of course would be
that there also existed a vast number which were furnished with the
present ending.) The second,--That by putting a comma after the word
{~GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER NU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER SIGMA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER TAU~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH OXIA~}{~GREEK SMALL LETTER FINAL SIGMA~}, S. Mark xvi. 9, is capable of being reconciled with S. Matth.
xxviii. 1(118).... I profess myself unable to understand how it can be
pretended that Eusebius would have subscribed to the opinion of
Tischendorf, Tregelles, and the rest, that the Gospel of S. Mark was never
finished by its inspired Author, or was mutilated before it came abroad;
at all events, that the last Twelve Verses are spurious.

II. The observations of Eusebius are found to have been adopted, and in
part transcribed, by an unknown writer of the vith century,--whether
HESYCHIUS or SEVERUS is not certainly known: but if it were Hesychius,
then it was not Severus; if Severus, then not Hesychius. This writer,
however, (whoever he may have been,) is careful to convince us that
individually he entertained _no doubt whatever_ about the genuineness of
this part of Scripture, for he says that he writes in ord