(_ibid._) would hinder our drawing at present any positive conclusions regarding the sacred text as known to them. Even the slender specimens of controverted readings collected in our Chap. XII would suffice to prove that their evidence is by no means exclusively favourable to Dr. Hort’s opinions, a fact for which we will allege but one instance out of many, the support given to the Received text by Hippolytus in that grand passage, John iii. 13(300). There are three considerable works relating to the criticism of the N. T. still open to the enterprise of scholars, and they can hardly be taken up at all except by the fresh hopefulness of scholars yet young. We need a fuller and more comprehensive collation of the cursive manuscripts (Hort, pp. 76-7): “a complete collection of all the fragments of the Thebaic New Testament is now the most pressing want in the province of textual criticism,” writes Bp. Lightfoot, and he might have added a better edition of the Bohairic also: but for the demands of the present controversy we must set in the first rank the necessity for a complete survey of the Patristic literature of the first five centuries at the least. While we concede to Dr. Hort that as a rule “negative patristic evidence”—that derived from the mere silence of the writer, “is of no force at all” (Hort, p. 201), and attach very slight importance to citations which are not express, it is from this source that we must look for any stable decision regarding the comparative purity in reference to the sacred autographs of the several classes of documents which have passed under our review.