The consequence of this voluntary poverty where our manuscript treasures are so abundant, of this deliberate rejection of the testimony of many hundreds of documents, of various countries, dates, and characters, may be told in a few words. Lachmann’s text seldom rests on more than four Greek codices, very often on three, not unfrequently on two; in Matt. vi. 20-viii. 5, and in 165 out of the 405 verses of the Apocalypse, on but _one_. It would have been a grievous thing indeed if we really had no better means of ascertaining the true readings of the New Testament than are contained in this editor’s scanty roll; and he who, for the sake of some private theory, shall presume to shut out from his mind the great mass of information God’s Providence has preserved for our use, will hardly be thought to have chosen the most hopeful method for bringing himself or others to the knowledge of the truth. But supposing, for the sake of argument, that Lachmann had availed himself to the utmost of the materials he has selected, and that they were adequate for the purpose of leading him up to the state of the text as it existed in the fourth century, would he have made any real advance in the criticism of the sacred volume? Is it not quite evident, even from the authorities contained in his notes, that copies in that age varied as widely—nay even more widely—than they did in later times? that the main corruptions and interpolations which perplex the student in Cod. Bezae and its Latin allies, crept in at a period anterior to the age of Constantine? From the Preface to his second volume (1850) it plainly appears (what might, perhaps, have been gathered by an esoteric pupil from the Preface to his first, pp. v, xxxiii), that he regarded this fourth century text, founded as it is on documentary evidence alone, as purely provisional; as mere subject-matter on which individual _conjecture_ might advantageously operate (Praef. 1850, p. v). Of the many examples wherewith he illustrates his principle we must be content with producing one, as an ample specimen both of Lachmann’s plan and of his judgement in reducing it to practice. In Matt. xxvii. 28 for ἐκδύσαντες, which gives a perfectly good sense, and seems absolutely required by τὰ ἱμάτια αὐτοῦ in ver. 31, _BDabc_ read ἐνδύσαντες, a variation either borrowed from Mark xv. 17, or more probably a mere error of the pen. Had the whole range of manuscripts, versions, and Fathers been searched, no other testimony in favour of ἐνδύσαντες could have been found save Cod. 157, _ff_2 and _q_ of the Old Latin, the Latin version of Origen, and a few codices of Chrysostom(235). Against these we might set a vast company of witnesses, exceeding those on the opposite side by full a hundred to one; yet because Cod. A and the Latin Vulgate alone are on Lachmann’s list, he is compelled by his system to place ἐνδύσαντες in the text as the reading of his authorities, reserving to