herefore occupy us any longer.

As another instance of ancient Glosses introduced to help out the sense,
the reading of St. John ix. 22 is confessedly [Greek: hina ean tis auton
homologesei Christon]. So all the MSS. but one, and so the Old Latin. So
indeed all the ancient versions except the Egyptian. Cod. D alone adds
[Greek: einai]: but [Greek: einai] must once have been a familiar gloss:
for Jerome retains it in the Vulgate: and indeed Cyril, whenever he
quotes the place[402], exhibits [Greek: ton Christon einai]. Not so
however Chrysostom[403] and Gregory of Nyssa[404].

Sec. 6.

There is scarcely to be found, amid the incidents immediately preceding
our Saviour's Passion, one more affecting or more exquisite than the
anointing of His feet at Bethany by Mary the sister of Lazarus, which
received its unexpected interpretation from the lips of Christ Himself.
'Let her alone. Against the day of My embalming hath she kept it.' (St.
John xii. 7.) He assigns to her act a mysterious meaning of which the
holy woman little dreamt. She had treasured up that precious unguent
against the day,--(with the presentiment of true Love, she knew that it
could not be very far distant),--when His dead limbs would require
embalming. But lo, she beholds Him reclining at supper in her sister's
house: and yielding to a Divine impulse she brings forth her reserved
costly offering and bestows it on Him at once. Ah, she little knew,--she
could not in fact have known,--that it was the only anointing those
sacred feet were destined ever to enjoy!... In the meantime through a
desire, as I suspect, to bring this incident into an impossible harmony
with what is recorded in St. Mark xvi. 1, with which obviously it has no
manner of connexion, a scribe is found at some exceedingly remote period
to have improved our Lord's expression into this:--'Let her alone in
order that against the day of My embalming she may keep it.' Such an
exhibition of the Sacred Text is its own sufficient condemnation. What
that critic exactly meant, I fail to discover: but I am sure he has
spoilt what he did not understand: and though it is quite true that
[Symbol: Aleph]BD with five other Uncial MSS. and Nonnus, besides the
Latin and Bohairic, Jerusalem, Armenian, and Ethiopic versions, besides
four errant cursives so exhibit the place, this instead of commending
the reading to our favour, only proves damaging to the witnesses by
which it is upheld. We learn that no re