d in fact be irrational. It does not mean, I say, that by
simply leaving out those last twelve verses we shall be restoring the
second Gospel to its original integrity. And this it is which makes the
present a different case from every other, and necessitates a fuller, if
not a different kind of proof.

(_b._) What then? It means that although an abrupt and impossible
termination would confessedly be the result of omitting verses 9-20, no
nearer approximation to the original autograph of the Evangelist is at
present attainable. Whether S. Mark was _interrupted_ before he could
finish his Gospel,--(as Dr. Tregelles and Professor Norton suggest;)--in
which case it will have been published by its Author in an unfinished
state: or whether "_the last leaf was torn away_" before a single copy of
the original could be procured,--(a view which is found to have recommended
itself to Griesbach;)--in which case it will have once had a different
termination from at present; which termination however, by the hypothesis,
has since been irrecoverably lost;--(and to one of these two wild
hypotheses the critics are logically reduced;)--_this_ we are not certainly
told. The critics are only agreed in assuming that S. Mark's Gospel _was
at first without the verses which at present conclude it_.

But this assumption, (that a work which has been held to be a complete
work for seventeen centuries and upwards was originally incomplete,) of
course requires _proof_. The foregoing improbable theories, based on a
gratuitous assumption, are confronted _in limine_ with a formidable
obstacle which must be absolutely got rid of before they can be thought
entitled to a serious hearing. It is a familiar and a fatal circumstance
that the Gospel of S. Mark has been furnished with its present termination
ever since the second century of the Christian aera.(24) In default,
therefore, of distinct historical evidence or definite documentary proof
that _at some earlier period than that_ it terminated abruptly, nothing
short of the utter unfitness of the verses which at present conclude S.
Mark's Gospel to be regarded as the work of the Evangelist, would warrant
us in assuming that they are the spurious accretion of the post-apostolic
age: and as such, at the end of eighteen centuries, to be deliberately
rejected. We must absolutely be furnished, I say, with internal evidence
of the most unequivocal character; or else with external testimony of a
direct and de