“Readings must be judged on internal grounds. One can hardly avoid doing so. It is natural and almost unavoidable. It must be admitted indeed that the choice of readings on internal evidence is liable to abuse. Arbitrary caprice may characterize it. It may degenerate into simple _subjectivity_. But though the temptation to misapply it be great, it must not be laid aside.... While allowing superior weight to the external sources of evidence, we feel the pressing necessity of the subjective. Here, as in other instances, the objective and subjective should accompany and modify one another. They cannot be rightly separated.” (Biblical Criticism, vol. ii. p. 374, 1852.) CHAPTER IX. HISTORY OF THE TEXT. An adequate discussion of the subject of the present chapter would need a treatise by itself, and has been the single theme of several elaborate works. We shall here limit ourselves to the examination of those more prominent topics, a clear understanding of which is essential for the establishment of trustworthy principles in the application of _external_ evidence to the correction of the text of the New Testament. 1. It was stated at the commencement of this volume that the autographs of the sacred writers “perished utterly in the very infancy of Christian history:” nor can any other conclusion be safely drawn from the general silence of the earliest Fathers, and from their constant habit of appealing to “ancient and approved copies(262),” when a reference to the originals, if extant, would have put an end to all controversy on the subject of various readings. Dismissing one passage in the genuine Epistles of Ignatius (d. 107), which has no real connexion with the matter(263), the only allusion to the autographs of Scripture met with in the primitive ages is the well-known declaration of Tertullian (fl. 200): “Percurre Ecclesias Apostolicas, apud quas ipsae adhuc Cathedrae Apostolorum suis locis praesident, apud quas ipsae Authenticae Literae eorum recitantur, sonantes vocem, et repraesentantes faciem uniuscujusque. Proximè est tibi Achaia, habes Corinthum. Si non longè es a Macedoniâ, habes Philippos, habes Thessalonicenses. Si potes in Asiam tendere, habes Ephesum. Si autem Italiae adjaces, habes Romam ...” (De Praescriptione Haereticorum, c. 36.) Attempts have been made, indeed, and that by eminent writers, to reduce the term “Authenticae Literae” so as to mean nothing more than “genuine, unadulterated Epistles,” or even the authentic Greek as opposed to the Latin translation(264). It seems enough to reply with Ernesti, that any such non-natural sense is absolutely excluded by the word “ipsae,” which would be utterly absurd, if “genuine” only were intended (Institutes, Pt. iii. Ch. ii. 3)(265): yet the African Tertullian was too little likely to be well informed on this subject, to entitle his rhetorical statement to any real attention(266). We need not try to