from the Father who uses it(138). On the other hand, the same author perpetually cites the selfsame text under two or more various forms; in the Gospels it is often impossible to determine to which of the three earlier ones reference is made; and, on the whole, where Scriptural quotations from ecclesiastical writers are single and unsupported, they may safely be disregarded altogether. An _express_ citation, however, by a really careful Father of the first four or five centuries (as Origen, for example), if supported by manuscript authority, and countenanced by the best versions, claims our respectful attention, and powerfully vindicates the reading which it favours(139). In fact, like Versions, Patristic citations cannot be taken primarily to establish any reading. But they are often invaluable in supplying support to manuscriptal authority, whether by proving a primitive antiquity, or in demonstrating by an overwhelming body of testimony that the passage or reading was accepted in all ages and in many provinces of the earlier church. Frequently also, they are of unquestionable use, when they bear witness in a less striking manner, or in smaller number. 2. The practice of illustrating the various readings of Scripture from the reliques of Christian antiquity is so obvious and reasonable, that all who have written critical annotations on the sacred text have resorted to it, from Erasmus downwards: the Greek or Latin commentators are appealed to in four out of the five marginal notes found in the Complutensian N. T. When Bishop Fell, however, came to prepare the first edition of the Greek Testament attended with any considerable apparatus for improving the text, he expressly rejected “S. Textus loca ab antiquis Patribus aliter quam pro recepto more laudata,” from which the toil of such a task did not so much deter him, “quam cogitatio quod minus utile esset futurum iisdem insistere.” (N. T. 1675, Praef.). “Venerandi enim illi scriptores,” he adds, “de verborum apicibus non multum soliciti, ex memoriâ quae ad institutum suum factura videbantur passim allegabant; unde factum ut de priscâ lectione ex illorum scriptis nil ferè certi potuerit hauriri.” It is certainly to the credit of Mill’s sagacity that he did not follow his patron’s example by setting aside Patristic testimony in so curt and compendious a manner(140). Nevertheless, no one can study Mill’s “Prolegomena” without being conscious of the fact, that the portion of them relating to the history of the text, as gathered from ecclesiastical writers, and the accumulation of that mass of quotations from the Fathers which stands below his Scripture text, must have been, what he asserts, the result of some years’ labour (N. T. Proleg. § 1513): yet these are just the parts of his celebrated work that have given the least satisfaction. The field indeed is too vast to be occupied by one man. A whole library of authors has to be thoroughly searched; each cited passage