nces
where _per fas et nefas_ an enforced Harmony has been established,--
which abound indeed, but are by no means common,--I am disposed to draw
a line.

This whole province is beset with difficulties: and the matter is in
itself wondrously obscure. I do not suppose, in the absence of any
evidence direct or indirect on the subject,--at all events I am not
aware--that at any time has there been one definite authoritative
attempt made by the Universal Church in her corporate capacity to
remodel or revise the Text of the Gospels. An attentive study of the
phenomena leads me, on the contrary, to believe that the several
corruptions of the text were effected at different times, and took their
beginning in widely different ways. I suspect that Accident was the
parent of many; and well meant critical assiduity of more. Zeal for the
Truth is accountable for not a few depravations: and the Church's
Liturgical and Lectionary practice must insensibly have produced others.
Systematic villainy I am persuaded has had no part or lot in the matter.
The decrees of such an one as Origen, if there ever was another like
him, will account for a strange number of aberrations from the Truth:
and if the Diatessaron of Tatian could be recovered[184], I suspect that
we should behold there the germs at least of as many more. But, I repeat
my conviction that, however they may have originated, the causes [are
not to be found in bad principle, but either in infirmities or
influences which actuated scribes unconsciously, or in a want of
understanding as to what is the Church's duty in the transmission from
generation to generation of the sacred deposit committed to her
enlightened care.]

Sec. 2.

1. When we speak of Assimilation, we do not mean that a writer while
engaged in transcribing one Gospel was so completely beguiled and
overmastered by his recollections of the parallel place in another
Gospel,--that, forsaking the expressions proper to the passage before
him, he unconsciously adopted the language which properly belongs to a
different Evangelist. That to a very limited extent this may have
occasionally taken place, I am not concerned to deny: but it would argue
incredible inattention to what he was professing to copy, on the one
hand,--astonishing familiarity with what he was not professing to copy,
on the other,--that a scribe should have been capable of offending
largely in this way. But in fact a moderate acquaintance with the
sub