which we have in our Prayer-books. The Table of daily
Lessons went under the title of Synaxarion (or Eclogadion); and the
Table of the Lessons of immovable Festivals and Saints' days was styled
Menologion[148].]

Liturgical use has proved a fruitful source of textual perturbation.
Nothing less was to have been expected,--as every one must admit who has
examined ancient Evangelia with any degree of attention. For a period
before the custom arose of writing out the Ecclesiastical Lections in
the 'Evangelistaries,' and 'Apostolos,' it may be regarded as certain
that the practice generally prevailed of accommodating an ordinary copy,
whether of the Gospels or of the Epistles, to the requirements of the
Church. This continued to the last to be a favourite method with the
ancients[149]. Not only was it the invariable liturgical practice to
introduce an ecclesiastical lection with an ever-varying formula,--by
which means the holy Name is often found in MSS. where it has no proper
place,--but notes of time, &c., ['like the unique and indubitably
genuine word [Greek: deuteroprotoi][150],' are omitted as carrying no
moral lesson, as well as longer passages like the case of the two verses
recounting the ministering Angel with the Agony and the Bloody
Sweat[151].

That Lessons from the New Testament were probably read in the assemblies
of the faithful according to a definite scheme, and on an established
system, at least as early as the fourth century, has been shewn to
follow from plain historical fact in the tenth chapter of the Twelve
Last Verses of St. Mark's Gospel, to which the reader is referred for
more detailed information. Cyril, at Jerusalem,--and by implication, his
namesake at Alexandria,--Chrysostom, at Antioch and at Constantinople,--
Augustine, in Africa,--all four expressly witness to the circumstance.
In other words, there is found to have been at least at that time fully
established throughout the Churches of Christendom a Lectionary, which
seems to have been essentially one and the same in the West and in the
East. That it must have been of even Apostolic antiquity may be inferred
from several considerations[152]. For example, Marcion, in A.D. 140,
would hardly have constructed an Evangelistarium and Apostolicon of his
own, as we learn from Epiphanius[153], if he had not been induced by the
Lectionary System prevailing around him to form a counterplan of
teaching upon the same model.]

Sec. 2.

Indeed, th