(γ) We now come to the feature which distinguishes Dr. Hort’s system from any hitherto propounded; by the acceptance or non-acceptance of which his whole edifice must stand or fall. He seems to exaggerate the force of extant evidence when he judges that the corrupt Western “was the more widely-spread text of Ante-Nicene times” (_ibid._ p. 120); but he tacitly assumes that many codices, versions, and ecclesiastical writers remained free from its malignant influence. The evidence of this latter class was preserved comparatively pure until the middle of the third century, when it was taken in hand, at some time between A.D. 250 and 350, “at what date it is impossible to say with confidence, and even for conjecture the materials are scanty” (_ibid._ p. 137), by the Syrian bishops and Fathers of the Patriarchate of Antioch, who undertook (1) “an authoritative revision at Antioch” of the Greek text, which (2) was then taken as a standard for a similar authoritative revision of the Syriac text, and (3) was itself at a later time subjected to a second authoritative revision, carrying out more completely the purposes of the first (_ibid._ p. 137). Of this twofold authoritative revision of the Greek text, of this formal transmutation of the Curetonian Syriac into the Peshitto (for this is what Dr. Hort means, though his language is a little obscure), although they must have been of necessity public acts of great Churches in ages abounding in Councils General or Provincial, not one trace remains in the history of Christian antiquity; no one writer seems conscious that any modification either of the Greek Scriptures or of the vernacular translation was made in or before his time. It is as if the Bishops’ Bible had been thrust out of the English Church service and out of the studies of her divines, and the Bible of 1611 had silently taken its place, no one knew how, or when, or why, or indeed that any change whatever had been made. Yet regarding his speculative conjecture as undubitably true, Dr. Hort proceeds to name the text as it stood before his imaginary era of transfusion a _Pre-Syrian_ text, and that into which it was changed, sometimes _Antiochian_, more often _Syrian_(298); while of the latter recension, though made deliberately, as our author believes, by the authoritative voice of the Eastern Church, he does not shrink from declaring that “all distinctively Syrian readings must be at once rejected” (_ibid._ p. 119), thus making a clean sweep of all critical materials, Fathers, versions, manuscripts uncial or cursive, comprising about nineteen-twentieths of the whole mass, which do not correspond with his preconceived opinion of what a correct text ought to be (_ibid._ p. 163).