].

[438] Cod. Amiat.

[439] g,--at Stockholm.

[440] Stephanus De Urbibus in voc. [Greek: Beroia].

CHAPTER XIII.

CAUSES OF CORRUPTION CHIEFLY INTENTIONAL.

IX. Corruption by Heretics.

Sec. 1.

The Corruptions of the Sacred Text which we have been hitherto
considering, however diverse the causes from which they may have
resulted, have yet all agreed in this: viz. that they have all been of a
lawful nature. My meaning is, that apparently, at no stage of the
business has there been _mala fides_ in any quarter. We are prepared to
make the utmost allowance for careless, even for licentious
transcription; and we can invent excuses for the mistaken zeal, the
officiousness if men prefer to call it so, which has occasionally not
scrupled to adopt conjectural emendations of the Text. To be brief, so
long as an honest reason is discoverable for a corrupt reading, we
gladly adopt the plea. It has been shewn with sufficient clearness, I
trust, in the course of the foregoing chapters, that the number of
distinct causes to which various readings may reasonably be attributed
is even extraordinary.

But there remains after all an alarmingly large assortment of textual
perturbations which absolutely refuse to fall under any of the heads of
classification already enumerated. They are not to be accounted for on
any ordinary principle. And this residuum of cases it is, which
occasions our present embarrassment. They are in truth so exceedingly
numerous; they are often so very considerable; they are, as a rule, so
very licentious; they transgress to such an extent all regulations; they
usurp so persistently the office of truth and faithfulness, that we
really know not what to think about them. Sometimes we are presented
with gross interpolations,--apocryphal stories: more often with
systematic lacerations of the text, or transformations as from an angel
of light.

We are constrained to inquire, How all this can possibly have come
about? Have there even been persons who made it their business of set
purpose to corrupt the [sacred deposit of Holy Scripture entrusted to
the Church for the perpetual illumination of all ages till the Lord
should come?]

At this stage of the inquiry, we are reminded that it is even notorious
that in the earliest age of all, the New Testament Scriptures were
subjected to such influences. In the age which immediately succeeded the
Apostolic there were heretical teachers not a few, who fin