d from Acts 26:14.

The most fruitful source of _omissions_ is the similar termination of
two adjacent words, lines, or sentences, causing the eye of the copyist
to overlook the word, line, or sentence intervening between the two
similar endings. The same error may be caused by the circumstance of two
sentences beginning in the same way. It should be remembered that in the
ancient manuscripts the text was written continuously in uncial--that
is, capital--letters, without any division between the words, which made
it more difficult for the copyist to follow the manuscript before him,
and for both the copyist and collater to discover the errors made in
transcription.

By far the greatest number of various readings had their origin in
simple inadvertence. Some of them, however, are due to unskilful
criticism; as when the copyist or the corrector sought to bring a
passage in one writer into more exact agreement with the corresponding
passage in another, to supply supposed deficiencies or correct supposed
errors in his copy, or to substitute smoother and more grammatical forms
of expression. Wilful falsifications in the interest of a particular
sect or party cannot with any show of justice be imputed to the men who
have perpetuated to us the text of the New Testament.

4. The _materials_ for textual criticism are much more abundant in the
case of the New Testament than of the Old. A vast mass of manuscripts
has been collected from different and distant regions, dating from the
fourth century and onward. Of these, part are in the original Greek,
part in ancient versions, or bilingual, that is, containing the original
and a version of it side by side. In addition to these are the
quotations of the early fathers, which are so abundant that a large part
of the New Testament text might be collected from them alone. The
question of the history of the text, as gathered from this rich mass of
materials, is very interesting, but is foreign to the plan of the
present work. To give even a history of the controversies respecting the
proper classification of the manuscripts of the New Testament according
to their characteristic readings would require a volume, and the
question must be regarded as yet unsettled. There are, however, some
general results, a few of the more important of which are here given
from Tregelles (in Horne, vol. 4, chap: 8).

The variations in the form of the sacred text are not due to any
general recens