We
do not charge the Roman Church with having corrupted the text, but if
the claim of Catholics as to the age of their Church is correct, every
corruption in the copies that were made from the original documents
occurred while she was exercising her remarkable custodianship over the
Bible. That officials of the Church, especially as we approach the
Middle Ages, had something to do with corrupting the sacred text is the
belief of the authority just quoted. "The early Church," he says, "did
not know anything of that anxious clinging to the letter which
characterizes the scientific rigor and the piety of modern times, and
therefore was not bent upon preserving the exact words. Moreover, the
first copies were made rather for private than for public use." Not a
few were found in sarcophagi; they had been buried with their owners.
"Copyists were careless, often wrote from dictation, and were liable to
misunderstand. Attempted improvements of the text in grammar and style;
efforts to harmonize the quotations in the New Testament with the Greek
of the Septuagint, but especially to harmonize the Gospels; the writing
out of abbreviations; incorporation of marginal notes in the text; the
embellishing of the Gospel narratives with stories drawn from
non-apostolic, though trustworthy, sources,--it is to these that we must
attribute the very numerous 'readings' or textual variations. It is true
that the copyists were sometimes learned men; but their zeal in making
corrections may have obscured the true text as much as the ignorance of
the unlearned. The copies, indeed, came under the eye of an official
reviser, but he may have sometimes exceeded his functions, and done more
harm than good by his changes."

All this happened while the Roman Church, according to Catholic writers,
was keeper of the Bible. The honor which these writers assert for their
Church is spurious. If there is any class of men for whom the glory must
be vindicated of having given to the world the pure Word of God in a
reliable text, it is the band of textual, or lower, critics who have
gathered and collated all existing manuscripts of the Bible. What an
immense amount of painstaking labor this necessitated the reader can
guess from the fact that for the New Testament alone about 3,000
manuscripts had to be examined word for word and letter for letter. The
men who undertook this gigantic task, arid who are always on the watch
for new finds, do not belong in the Ro