17. The stichometry of the sacred books has next to be considered. The Greeks and Romans measured the contents of their MSS. by lines, not only in poetry, but also artificially in prose for a standard line of fifteen or sixteen syllables, called by the earliest writers ἔπος, afterwards στίχος(57). Not only do Athanasius [d. 373], Gregory Nyssen [d. 396], Epiphanius [d. 403], and Chrysostom [d. 407] inform us that in their time the Book of Psalms was already divided into στίχοι, while Jerome [d. 420?] testifies the same for the prophecies of Isaiah; but Origen also [d. 254] speaks of the second and third Epistles of St. John as both of them not exceeding one hundred στίχοι, of St. Paul’s Epistles as consisting of few, St. John’s first Epistle as of very few (Euseb. Hist. Eccles. vi. 25, cited by Tischendorf, Cod. Sinait., Proleg. p. xxi, note 2, 1863). Even the apocryphal letter of our Lord to Abgarus is described as ὀλιγοστίχου μέν, πολυδυνάμου δὲ ἐπιστολῆς (Euseb. H. E. i. 13): while Eustathius of Antioch in the fourth century reckoned 135 στίχοι between John viii. 59 and x. 41. More general is the use of the word in Ephraem the Syrian [d. 378], Ὅταν δὲ ἀναγινώσκῃς, ἐπιμελῶς καὶ ἐμπόνως ἀναγίνωσκε, ἐν πολλῇ καταστάσει διερχόμενος τὸν στίχον (tom. iii. 101). As regards the Psalms, we may see their arrangement for ourselves in Codd. Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, wherein, according to the true principles of Hebrew poetry, the verses do not correspond in metre or quantity of syllables, but in the parallelism or relationship subsisting between the several members of the same sentence or stanza(58). Such στίχοι were therefore not “space-lines,” but “sense-lines.” It seems to have occurred to Euthalius, a deacon of Alexandria, as it did long afterwards to Bishop Jebb when he wrote his “Sacred Literature,” that a large portion of the New Testament might be divided into στίχοι on the same principles: and that even where that distribution should prove but artificial, it would guide the public reader in the management of his voice, and remove the necessity for an elaborate system of punctuation. Such, therefore, we conceive to be the use and design of stichometry, as applied to the Greek Testament by Euthalius(59), whose edition of the Acts and Epistles was published A.D. 490. Who distributed the στίχοι of the Gospels (which are in truth better suited for such a process than the Epistles) does not appear. Although but few manuscripts now exist that are written στοιχηδόν or στιχηρῶς (a plan which consumed too much vellum to become general), we read in many copies, added usually to the subscription at the foot of each of the books of the New Testament, a calculation of the number of στίχοι it contained, the numbers being sufficiently unlike to show that the arrangement was not the same in all codices, yet near enough to prove that they were divided on the same principle(60). In the few documents written στιχηρῶς that survive, the