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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1854 Excerpt:...do uphold certain readings (often in accordance with fathers), and that they are in this confirmed by certain MSS. Even when much might be said against a reading so attested, it must, on principles of evidence, be regarded as highly probable, even if not certainly genuine. The result, then, of this Comparative Criticism stands thus:--Readings, whose antiquity is proved apart from MSS., are found in repeated instances in a few of the extant copies. These few MSS., the text of which is thus proved to be ancient, include some (and often several) of the oldest MSS. extant. In some cases, the attested ancient reading is found in but one or two MSS., but those of the most ancient class. There are, I suppose, on a rough estimate, between.two and three thousand places of this kind. t Thus those which depend on the order of word have been wholly omitted; for although some of them are very striking, it might be thought that a preliminary investigation was needed to prove that the versions in general adhere to the original in this particular. And, as certain MSS. arc found, by a process of inductive proof, to contain an ancient text, their character as witnesses must be considered to be so established, that in other places their testimony deserves peculiar weight. It is in vain for it to be objected that the readings of the versions, on which so much stress has been laid, arc purely accidents of transcription or translation, and that the accordance of certain MSS. with them is equally the result of fortuitous circumstances, or of arbitrary alteration. This might be plausible in the case of some arte version; but when there are two versions which combine in a definite reading, this plausibility is almost excluded; and so when the according versions are three, or four,...