explain away his obvious meaning, but we may fairly demur to the evidence of this honest, but impetuous and wrong-headed man. We have no faith in the continued existence of autographs which are vouched for on no better authority than the real or apparent exigency of _his_ argument(267). 2. Besides the undesigned and, to a great extent, unavoidable differences subsisting between manuscripts of the New Testament within a century of its being written, the wilful corruptions introduced by heretics soon became a cause of loud complaint in the primitive ages of the Church(268). Dionysius, Bishop of Corinth, addressing the Church of Rome and Soter its Bishop (A.D. 168-176), complains that even his own letters had been tampered with: καὶ ταύτας οἱ τοῦ διαβόλου ἀπόστολοι ζιζανίων γεγέμικαν, ἃ μὲν ἐξαιροῦντες, ἃ δὲ προστιθέντες; οἷς τὸ οὐαὶ κεῖται: adding, however, the far graver offence, οὐ θαυμαστὸν ἄρα εἰ καὶ τῶν κυριακῶν ῥαδιουργῆσαί τινες ἐπιβέβληνται γραφῶν (Euseb., Eccl. Hist., iv. 23), where αἱ κυριακαὶ γραφαί can be none other than the Holy Scriptures. Nor was the evil new in the age of Dionysius. Not to mention Asclepiades, or Theodotus, or Hermophylus, or Apollonides, who all under the excuse of correcting the sacred text corrupted it(269), or the Gnostics Basilides (A.D. 130?) and Valentinus (A.D. 150?) who published additions to the sacred text which were avowedly of their own composition, Marcion of Pontus, the arch-heretic of that period, coming to Rome on the death of its Bishop Hyginus (A.D. 142)(270), brought with him that mutilated and falsified copy of the New Testament, against which the Fathers of the second century and later exerted all their powers, and whose general contents are known to us chiefly through the writings of Tertullian and subsequently of Epiphanius. It can hardly be said that Marcion deserves very particular mention in relating the history of the sacred text(271). Some of the variations from the common readings which his opponents detected were doubtless taken from manuscripts in circulation at the time, and, being adopted through no private preferences of his own, are justly available for critical purposes. Thus in 1 Thess. ii. 15, Tertullian, who saw only τοὺς προφήτας in his own copies, objects to Marcion’s reading τοὺς ἰδίους προφήτας (“licet _suos_ adjectio sit haeretici”), although ἰδίους stands in the received text, in Evann. KL (DE in later hands) and all cursives except eight, in the Gothic and both (?) Syriac versions, in Chrysostom, Theodoret, and John Damascenus. Here the heretic’s testimony is useful in showing the high antiquity of ἰδίους, even though אABDEFGP, eight cursives, Origen thrice, the Vulgate, Armenian, Ethiopic, and all three Egyptian versions, join with Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, Westcott and Hort in rejecting it, some of them perhaps in compliance with Tertullian’s decision. In similar instances the evidence of Marcion, as to