(γ) Hence the second reason for supporting the text of Westcott and Hort urged by the _Two Revisers_ relates to an investigation of facts hitherto but partially ascertained: the third, like the first, involves only matters of opinion, in which individual judgements and prepossessions bear the chief part. “Yet a third reason is supplied by Internal Evidence, or, in other words, by considerations ... of intrinsic or of Transcriptional Probability” (The Revisers &c., p. 26): and “here,” they very justly add, “it is obvious that we enter at once into a very delicate and difficult domain of textual criticism, and can only draw our conclusions with the utmost circumspection and reserve” (_ibid._). On the subject of Internal Evidence enough for our present purpose has been said, and Dr. Hort’s Transcriptional head appears to be Bp. Ellicott’s _paradiplomatic_ under a more convenient name. Our author’s discussion of what he calls the “rudimental criticism” of Internal evidence (Hort, Part ii. pp. 19-72), if necessarily somewhat abstruse, is one of the most elaborate and interesting in his admirable volume. It is sometimes said that all reasoning is analytical, not synthetical; the reducing a foregone conclusion to the first principles on which it rests, rather than the building upon those first principles the materials wherewith to construct the conclusion. Of this portion of Dr. Hort’s labours the _dictum_ is emphatically true. Cod. B and its characteristic peculiarities are never out of the author’s mind, and those lines of thought are closely followed which most readily lead up to the theory of that manuscript’s practical impeccability. We allege this statement in no disparaging spirit, and it may be that Dr. Hort will not wholly disagree with us. Not only is he duly sensible of the precariousness of Intrinsic evidence, inasmuch as “the uncertainty of the decision in ordinary cases is shown by the great diversity of judgement which is actually found to exist” (Hort, p. 21), but he boldly, and no less boldly than truly, intimates that in such cases the ultimate decision must rest with the individual critic: “in almost all texts variations occur where personal judgement inevitably takes a large part in the final decision.... Different minds will be impressed by different parts of the evidence as clearer than the rest, and so virtually ruling the rest: here therefore personal discernment would seem the surest ground for confidence” (_ibid._ p. 65). For the critic’s confidence perhaps, not for that of his reader.