5. Nor can it easily be denied that the various readings of the New Testament current from the middle of the second to the middle of the third century, were neither fewer nor less considerable than such language would lead us to anticipate. Though no surviving manuscript of the Old Latin version, or versions, dates before the fourth century, and most of them belong to a still later age, yet the general correspondence of their text with that used by the first Latin Fathers is a sufficient voucher for its high antiquity. The connexion subsisting between this Latin version, the Curetonian Syriac, and Codex Bezae, proves that the text of these documents is considerably older than the vellum on which they are written; the Peshitto Syriac also, most probably the very earliest of all translations, though approaching far nearer to the received text than they, sufficiently resembles these authorities in many peculiar readings to exhibit the general tone and character of one class of manuscripts extant in the second century, two hundred years anterior to Codd. אB. Now it may be said without extravagance that no set of Scriptural records affords a text less probable in itself or less sustained by any rational principles of external evidence, than that of Cod. D, of the Latin codices, and (so far as it accords with them) of Cureton’s Syriac. Interpolations, as insipid in themselves as unsupported by other evidence, abound in them all(277): additions so little in accordance with the genuine spirit of Holy Writ that some critics (though I, for one, profess no skill in such alchemy) have declared them to be as easily separable from the text which they encumber, as the foot-notes appended to a modern book are from the main body of the work (Tregelles, An Account of the Printed Text, p. 138, note). It is no less true to fact than paradoxical in sound, that the worst corruptions to which the New Testament has ever been subjected, originated within a hundred years after it was composed; that Irenaeus and the African Fathers and the whole Western, with a portion of the Syrian Church, used far inferior manuscripts to those employed by Stunica, or Erasmus, or Stephen thirteen centuries later, when moulding the Textus Receptus. What passage in the Holy Gospels would be more jealously guarded than the record of the heavenly voice at the Lord’s Baptism? Yet Augustine (De Consensu Evangelist, ii. 14) marked a variation which he thought might be found “in aliquibus fide dignis exemplaribus,” though not “in antiquioribus codicibus Graecis,” where, in the place of ἐν σοὶ ἠυδόκησα (Luke iii. 22), the words ἐγὼ σήμερον γεγέννηκά σε are substituted from Psalm ii. 7: so also reads the Manichaean Faustus apud Augustin.; Enchiridion ad Laurentium, c. 49. The only Greek copy which maintains this important reading is D: it is met with moreover in _abc_ (in _d_ of course), in _ff_1 _primâ manu_, and in _l_, whose united