Yet is it true that we are thus cast upon the wide ocean without a compass or a guide? Can no clue be found that may conduct us through the tangled maze? Is there no other method of settling the text of the New Testament than by collecting and marshalling and scrutinizing the testimony of thousands of separate documents, now agreeing, now at issue with each other:—manuscripts, versions, ecclesiastical writers, whose mutual connexion and interdependence, as far as they exist (and to some extent they do and _must_ exist), defy all our skill and industry to detect and estimate aright? This would surely be a discouraging view of critical science as applied to the sacred volume, and it is by no means warranted by proved and admitted facts. Elaborate systems have failed, as might have been looked for from the first. It was premature to frame them in the present stage of things, while the knowledge we possess of the actual contents of our extant authorities is imperfect, vague, and fragmentary; while our conclusions are liable to be disturbed from time to time by the rapid accession of fresh materials, of whose character we are still quite ignorant. But if we be incompetent to devise theories on a grand or imposing scale, a more modest and a safer course is open. Men of the present generation may be disqualified for taking a general survey of the whole domain of this branch of divine learning, who may yet be employed, serviceably and with honour, in cultivating each one for himself some limited and humble field of special research, to which his taste, his abilities, or opportunities have attached him: those persons may usefully improve a farm, who cannot hope to conquer a kingdom. Out of the long array of uncollated manuscripts which swell our catalogues, let the student choose from the mass a few within his reach which he may deem worthy of complete examination; or exhaust the information some ecclesiastical writer of the first six centuries can afford; or contribute what he can to an exact acquaintance with some good ancient version, ascertaining the genius of its language and (where this is attainable) the literary history of its text. If, in the course of such quiet toil, he shall mark (as a patient observer will find cause to mark) resemblances and affinities more than accidental, between documents of widely different ages and countries; he will not only be contributing to the common stock what cannot fail to be available hereafter as raw material, but he will be helping to solve that great problem which has hitherto in part eluded the most earnest inquiries, the investigation of the true laws and principles of COMPARATIVE CRITICISM.