Inasmuch as the manuscripts on which our received text was based must, beyond question, be referred to his Byzantine family, wide as were the variations of Griesbach’s revised text from that of Elzevir(228), had his theory been pushed to its legitimate consequences, the changes it required would have been greater still. The very plan of his work, however, seemed to reserve a slight preference for the received text _as such_, in cases of doubt and difficulty; and this editor, with a calmness and sagacity which may well be called judicial, was usually disposed to relax his stern mechanical law when persuaded by reasons founded on internal probabilities, which (as we cheerfully admit) few men have been found able to estimate with so much patience and discrimination. The plain fact is, that while disciples like Moldenhawer and persons who knew even less than he were regarding Griesbach’s system as self-evidently true, their wiser master must have had many a misgiving as to the safety of that imposing structure his rare ingenuity had built upon the sand. The very essence of his theory consisted in there being not two distinct families, but _three_; the majority deciding in all cases of dispute. Yet he hardly attempted, certainly neither he nor any one after him succeeded in the attempt, to separate the Alexandrian from the Western family, without resorting to arguments which would prove that there are as many classes as there are manuscripts of early date. The supposed accordance of the readings of Origen, so elaborately scrutinized for this purpose by Griesbach, with Cod. A, on which our editor lays the greatest stress, has been shown by Archbishop Laurence (Remarks on Griesbach’s Systematic Classification, 1814) to be in a high degree imaginary(229). It must have been in anticipation of some such researches, and in a partial knowledge of their sure results, that Griesbach was driven to that violent and most unlikely hypothesis, that Cod. A follows the Byzantine class of authorities in the Gospels, the Western in the Acts and Catholic Epistles, and the Alexandrian in St. Paul.