Acts and D of the Pauline Epistles, also N, P, R, Z, of the Gospels and H of the Epistles (fragmentary). I pass by a number of small but valuable fragments of the fifth and sixth centuries. As to the cursive MSS., ranging from the tenth century to the sixteenth, we have of the Gospels more than six hundred; of the Acts over two hundred; of the Pauline Epistles nearly three hundred; of the Revelation more than one hundred,— not reckoning the Lectionaries or MSS. containing the lessons from the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles read in the service of the church, of which there are more than four hundred. Of these cursive MSS. it is true that the great majority are of comparatively small value; and many have been imperfectly collated or only inspected. Some twenty or thirty of them, however, are of exceptional value-a few of very great value - for their agreement with the most ancient authorities.

But this is only a part of our critical materials. The translations of the New Testament, made at an early date for the benefit of Christian converts ignorant of Greek, and the very numerous quotations by a series of writers from the second century onwards, represent the text current in widely separated regions of the Christian world, and are often of the highest importance in determining questions of reading. Many of these authorities go back to a date one or two centuries earlier than our oldest MSS. Of the ancient versions, the Old Latin and the Curetonian Syriac belong to the second century; the two Egyptian versions, the Coptic or Memphitic and the Sahidic or Thebaic, probably to the earlier part of the third; the Peshito Syriac in its present form perhaps to the beginning of the fourth; in the latter part of the same century, we have the Gothic and the Latin Vulgate, and perhaps the Aethiopic; in the fifth century, the Armenian and the Jerusalem Syriac; and, in the sixth, the Philoxenian Syriac, revised by Thomas of Harkel, A.D. 616; to say nothing of several later versions.

Since the beginning of the present century, thoroughly critical editions of the Greek Testament have been published by such scholars as Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischen

dorf, and Tregelles, in which the rich materials collected by generations of scholars have been used for the improvement of the text; we have learned how to estimate the comparative value of our authorities; the principles of textual criticism have been in a good measure settled; the more important questions in regard to the text have been discussed, and there has been a steadily growing agreement of the ablest critics in regard to them.

With this view of what has been done in the way of preparation, we will consider, finally :

4. The ground for expecting a great improvement in the text from the work now undertaken by the British and American Revision Committees. On this little needs now to be said. We have seen that the text from which the common English version was made contains many known errors, and that our present means of correcting it are ample. The work of revision is in the hands of a body of the best Christian scholars in England and America, and their duty to the Christian public is plain. The composition of the Committees, and the rules which they follow, are such that we may be sure that changes will not be made rashly; on the other hand, we may be confident that the work will be done honestly and faithfully. When an important reading is clearly a mistake of copyists, it will be fearlessly discarded; when it is doubtful, the doubtfulness will be noted in the margin; and the common English reader will at last have the benefit of the devoted labors of such scholars as Mill, Bengel, Wetstein, Griesbach, Lachmann, Tischendorf, and Tregelles, who have contributed so much to the restoration of the text of the New Testament to its original purity. On the English Committee itself there are at least three men who deserve to be ranked with those I have named: Professor Westcott and Dr. Hort, two of the best scholars that England has produced, who have given more than twenty years to the preparation of a critical edition of the Greek Testament; and Dr. Scrivener, whose labors in the collation and publication of important MSS. have earned the gratitude of all Biblical scholars. Professor Lightfoot is

another scholar of the highest eminence who has given much attention to the subject of textual criticism. We may rely upon it that such men as these, and such men as constitute the American Committee, whom I need not name, will not act hastily in a matter like this, and will not, on the other hand, "handle the word of God deceitfully," or suffer it to be adulterated through a weak and short-sighted timidity.

One remark may be added. All statements about the action of the Revision Committee in regard to any particular passage are wholly premature and unauthorized, for this reason, if for no other, that their work is not yet ended. When the result of their labors shall be published, it will be strange if it does not meet with some ignorant and bigoted criticism; but I feel sure that all intelligent and fair-minded scholars will emphatically indorse the judgment of Dr. Westcott, expressed in the Preface to the second edition of his History of the English Bible (1872), “that in no parallel case have the readings of the original texts to be translated been discussed and determined with equal care, thoroughness, and candor."

As regards the text of the Old Testament, the MSS. collated in the last century by Kennicott and De' Rossi all fall within the Masoretic period, and present for the most part only trivial variations. In general, our means of correcting the Hebrew text followed by our translators are very far inferior to those which we possess in the case of the Greek text of the New Testament, and but few changes on this ground are to be expected in the revised translation. of the canonical books.

XI.

THE GOSPELS IN THE NEW REVISION.

[Originally printed as three articles in the Sunday School Times for May 28, June 4, and June 11, 1881.]

A VERY important part of the work of the new revision has consisted in the settlement of the Greek text to be followed in the translation. This was a duty which could not be evaded. To undertake to correct merely the mistranslations in the common English version, without reference to the question of the genuineness of the text, would be equivalent to saying that, while the mistakes of translators must be rectified, those of transcribers and editors should be regarded as sacred. It would be deliberately imposing on the Christian public hundreds of readings which all intelligent scholars, on the ground of decisive evidence, now agree in rejecting as spurious.

That there should be many mistakes in our MSS. of the Greek New Testament, as there are in all other MSS. of ancient authors, and that a portion of these mistakes should be capable of correction only by the comparison of many different copies, was inevitable in the nature of things, unless a perpetual miracle should be wrought. That such a miracle has not been wrought is shown by the multitude of "various readings" which a comparison of copies has actually brought to light, the number of which was roughly reckoned at thirty thousand in the days of Mill (1707), and may now be estimated at not fewer than one hundred thousand.

This host of various readings may startle one who is not acquainted with the subject, and he may imagine that the whole text of the New Testament is thus rendered uncertain. But a careful analysis will show that nineteen

twentieths of these are of no more consequence than the palpable errata in the first proof of a modern printer; they have so little authority, or are so manifestly false, that they may be at once dismissed from consideration. Of those which remain, probably nine-tenths are of no importance as regards the sense; the differences either cannot be represented in a translation, or affect the form of expression merely, not the essential meaning of the sentence. Though the corrections made by the revisers in the Greek text of the New Testament followed by our translators probably exceed two thousand, hardly one-tenth of them, perhaps not one-twentieth, will be noticed by the ordinary reader. Of the small residue, many are indeed of sufficient interest and importance to constitute one of the strongest reasons for making a new revision, which should no longer suffer the known errors of copyists to take the place of the words of the evangelists and apostles. But the chief value of the work accomplished by the self-denying scholars who have spent so much time and labor in the search for MSS., and in their collation or publication, does not consist, after all, in the corrections of the text which have resulted from their researches. These corrections may affect a few of the passages which have been relied on for the support of certain doctrines, but not to such an extent as essentially to alter the state of the question. Still less is any question of Christian duty touched by the multitude of various readings. The greatest service which the scholars who have devoted themselves to critical studies and the collection of critical materials have rendered, has been the establishment of the fact that, on the whole, the New Testament writings have come down to us in a text remarkably free from important corruptions, even in the late and inferior MSS. on which the so-called "Received Text" was founded; while the helps which we now possess for restoring it to its primitive purity far exceed those which we enjoy in the case of any important classical author whose works have come down to us. The multitude of "various readings," which to the thoughtless or ignorant seems so alarming, is