plished facts that the minds of the Disciples are now again and again prepared for them. The home at Capernaum was no longer available, for now the Son of man had not where to lay his head. The mission of the Seventy, with the instructions given to them, already contemplates a state of things altogether different from that which marks all the main portion of our Lord's personal ministry. The mighty works done in Chorazin, Bethsaida and Capernaum have been brought to an end, and are spoken of as having failed in their object. Finally, a visit to Bethany, and presumably to Jerusalem, mark the actual commencement of the first scene of the last act of the Divine Drama. In all this there can be no possible room for doubt that in this section, viii. 22—xi. 13, S. Luke means his readers to understand that his history is rapidly approaching to its climax, and that he has entirely done with all those events which gradually led up to it.

But what an utter and hopeless contradiction to all this is involved as we pass on, in reading the received text, to the section xi. 14-xiii. 21. We are carried back in a moment to utterly different circumstances, different thoughts, different arguments, all of which tell us of the re-opening of a closed chapter of our Author's history. We don't want the evidence of three other writers to tell us this. They tell us no more than S. Luke tells us himself.

For see what he does. He transports us at once to places and scenes, discourses and teaching, which could not possibly find their proper place after the point in the history to which, as the text now stands, he has conducted us.

In section xi. 14-xiii. 21 we are back at Capernaum;

back amongst allusions which suppose the time of probation for that city to be still present; back amongst conversations which suppose the death of Christ to be still an event altogether in the future; back in the presence of the baptism of suffering thought of as yet far distant; back at the parable of the fig-tree, with its manifest allusion to the whole year of patient and laborious teaching, which was yet to precede the end of the ministry; and finally back amongst parables belonging to a form of teaching which S. Luke himself in the beginning of Chapter VIII., has identified with an earlier time.

Apart from our actual knowledge of the facts of the case derived from the other Evangelists, when we thus examine the narrative of S. Luke by itself, we feel instinctively that we must be confronted with some mistaken arrangement of the text, which, even if it should prove unexplainable, we should feel an almost insuperable difficulty in attributing to the deliberate design of the writer himself.

Required to prove

4.

That a sufficient cause to account for the alleged displacement is to be found in the flagrant contradiction which S. Luke's text, as it originally stood, would, at first sight, appear to present to that of S. Mark.

It is universally admitted, that of all the many causes which have led to alterations of the original text of the Gospels, none has been more fruitful of error than the desire on the part of copyists, and sometimes of revisers, to remove the appearance of contradiction between the several narra

tives. Whilst it is evident, that just in proportion as an alteration once made is plausible and apparently necessary, in that proportion it is likely to be repeated and perpetuated, until at last it may even come to be received as certainly the true reading.

If this be so even when the existence of an alternative reading is known, and supported by the authority of many of the oldest MSS.-as in the case of Luke iv. 44,-how much more would it be true of any alteration which may have been made during what we may term the 'pre-historic' period, viz. that which preceded the date of the earliest MSS. and Versions which have come down to us.

The tendency to harmonize, which is proved to have existed in later times, must have been, and we know was, just as potent during the several centuries which fail to provide any contemporary manuscript evidence of its handiwork. Thus, for instance, we find a disciple of Irenæus, at the end of the second or very early in the third century, actually accusing his opponents not only of having tampered with the Holy Scriptures but of having published what they called 'corrected copies,' but which he considered simply ruined'.

It will thus be seen that the absence of MS. evidence does not seriously affect the probability of a pre-historic alteration having been made, provided the alteration is not only provable by sufficient internal evidence, but is of so manifestly plausible a character as to make it likely that, if made at all, it would have been made in the very earliest MSS.

The difficulty which would naturally have suggested the 1 See Salmon's Introduction to the New Testament, p. 66.

displacement-supposing, as is almost certain to have been the case, that a particular passage of S. Mark was understood formerly as it is to this day-was apparently insurmountable. S. Mark would be found describing what, in modern times, is usually called 'the Day of Teaching'i.e. the Day of Teaching by Parables-and clearly stating, that the day ended by our Lord embarking to cross the Sea of Galilee, on the occasion of His stilling the tempest. But between his record of the (so-called) Day of Teaching and this embarkation, S. Luke would be found, as we suppose the text to have originally stood, to interpose a series of events and discourses which occupied at least one other day and that day a Sabbath, and which unless closely compared with the incidents related by S. Matthew and S. Mark would have appeared to have occupied a much longer period.

A more flagrant contradiction between the two writers than would at first sight have appeared to be involved cannot be imagined. Moreover it was a contradiction which could not possibly be explained until the meaning of S. Luke's Preface was understood. Until that time--and we must remember that its meaning may then, as it necessarily was afterwards, have been unperceived-the appearance of so grave a contradiction had either to be acquiesced in, or else it was necessary to rectify it by some such apparently simple plan as that of postponing the offending section, and bringing S. Luke's account of the 'embarkation' into the same relative position with regard to the Parable of the Sower and the (so-called) Day of Teaching as it occupied in S. Mark.

Assuredly when a choice had to be made between these

alternatives, the maxim 'Between two evils choose the least' was extremely likely sooner or later to be acted upon.

Nor in the days of manuscript, and before any habit of studying the Gospels together could possibly have become general, would the inevitable consequences of this apparently simple alteration have been necessarily apparent. By taking a portion of S. Luke's narrative which records. so many events only mentioned by himself, and placing it beyond the point at which it could conflict with any statement of either of the other Evangelists, i. e. beyond what was probably regarded as the end of the Galilæan ministry, they would seem to get over the contradiction, without the possibility of creating any fresh difficulty. The almost inconceivable confusion, which the alteration would involve, both at the point at which the section was omitted, and at the point at which it was freshly inserted, and the way in which this confusion would extend to the other Gospels, would not probably even suggest itself. And so the deed would be done, and the attempt to rectify one apparent contradiction would create a host of only too real ones.

Nor, we may add parenthetically, could the evil stop here, for the very cutting, instead of untying, the knot altered an arrangement which only needed to have been studied to have been understood, and which when understood would have formed at once an available clue to the other comparatively slight difficulties which alone, before this displacement, the Gospels must have presented.

That the apparent contradiction, thus fatally rectified, was of a sufficiently striking and embarrassing character to make it certain to have been perceived directly the Gospels of S. Mark and S. Luke were first compared together is