2. _Brevis vita, ars longa._ For this lawful cause, if for no other, the most ardent student of Biblical criticism would fain embrace some such system as is advocated by Lachmann and his followers, if only it could be done in tolerable safety. The process of investigation might thus be diminished twentyfold, and the whole subject brought within a compass not too vast for one man’s diligence or the space of an ordinary lifetime. The simplicity and comparative facility of this process of resorting to the few for instruction hitherto supposed to be diffused among the many, has created in its favour a strong and not unnatural prejudice, which has yielded, so far as it has yet yielded at all, to nothing but the stubborn opposition of indisputable facts. It will also readily be admitted, that certain principles, not indeed peculiar to this theory, but brought by it into greater prominence, are themselves most reasonable and true. No one will question, for example, that “if the reading of the ancient authorities in general is unanimous, there can be but little doubt that it should be followed, whatever may be the later testimonies; for it is most improbable that the independent testimony of early MSS., versions, and Fathers should accord with regard to something entirely groundless” (Tregelles, N. T., Introductory Notice, p. 2). No living man, possessed of a tincture of scholarship, would dream of setting up testimony exclusively modern against the unanimous voice of antiquity. The point on which we insist is briefly this:—that the evidence of ancient authorities is anything but unanimous; that they are perpetually at variance with each other, even if we limit the term ancient within the narrowest bounds. Shall it include, among the manuscripts of the Gospels, none but the five oldest copies Codd. אABCD(288)? The reader has but to open the first recent critical work he shall meet with, to see them scarcely ever in unison; perpetually divided two against three, or perhaps four against one. All the readings these venerable monuments contain must of course be _ancient_, or they would not be found where they are; but they cannot all be true. So again, if our search be extended to the versions and primitive Fathers, the same phenomenon unfolds itself, to our grievous perplexity and disappointment. How much is contained in Cureton’s Syriac and the Old Latin for which no Greek original can now be alleged? Do not the earliest ecclesiastical writers describe readings as existing and current in their copies, of which few traces can be met with at present(289)? If the question be fairly proposed, “What right have we to set virtually aside the agreement in the main of our oldest uncials, at the distance of one or two centuries—of which, owing probably to the results of persecution, we have no MS. remains—with the citations of the primitive Fathers, and with the earliest versions?”: the answer must be rendered, without hesitation, _no right whatever_.