ers. Now these quotations are notoriously
lax. It will be necessary then to have some means of judging, what
degree and kind of laxity is admissible; what does, and what does
not, prevent the reference of a quotation to a given source.

The author of 'Supernatural Religion,' indeed, has not felt the
necessity for this preliminary step. He has taken up, as it were,
at haphazard, the first standard that came to his hand; and, not
unnaturally, this is found to be very much the standard of the
present literary age, when both the mechanical and psychological
conditions are quite different from those that prevailed at the
beginning of the Christian era. He has thus been led to make a
number of assertions which will require a great deal of
qualification. The only sound and scientific method is to make an
induction (if only a rough one) respecting the habit of early
quotation generally, and then to apply it to the particular cases.

Here there will be three classes of quotation more or less
directly in point: (1) the quotations from the Old Testament in
the New; (2) the quotations from the Old Testament in the same
early writers whose quotations from the New Testament are the
point in question; (3) quotations from the New Testament, and more
particularly from the Gospels, in the writers subsequent to these,
at a time when the Canon of the Gospels was fixed and we can be
quite sure that our present Gospels are being quoted.

This method of procedure however is not by any means so plain and
straightforward as it might seem. The whole subject of Old
Testament quotations is highly perplexing. Most of the quotations
that we meet with are taken from the LXX version; and the text of
that version was at this particular time especially uncertain and
fluctuating. There is evidence to show that it must have existed
in several forms which differed more or less from that of the
extant MSS. It would be rash therefore to conclude at once,
because we find a quotation differing from the present text of the
LXX, that it differed from that which was used by the writer
making the quotation. In some cases this can be proved from the
same writer making the same quotation more than once and
differently each time, or from another writer making it in
agreement with our present text. But in other cases it seems
probable that the writer had really a different text before him,
because he quotes it more than once, or another writer quotes it,
with the