Now, as a first approximation to the actual state of the case, the several classes of changes which we have enumerated admit of a certain rude geographical distribution, one of them appertaining to Western Christendom and the earliest Fathers of the African and Gallic Churches (including North Italy under the latter appellation); a second to Egypt and its neighbourhood; the third originally to Syria and Christian Antioch, in later times to the Patriarchate of Constantinople. We have here, no doubt, much to remind us of Griesbach and his scheme of triple recensions, but with this broad distinction between his conclusions and those of modern critics, that whereas he regarded the existence of his families as a patent fact, and grounded upon it precise and mechanical rules for the arrangement of the text, we are now content to perceive no more than unconscious tendencies, liable to be modified or diverted by a thousand occult influences, of which in each single case it is impossible to form an estimate beforehand. Even that marked bias in the direction of adding to the record, which is the reproach of Codex Bezae and some of its compeers, and renders the text of the Acts as exhibited by DE, by the cursive 137, and the margin of the Harkleian Syriac, as unlike that commonly read as can well be imagined(304), is mixed up with a proneness to omissions which we should look for rather from another class of documents (e.g. the rejection of ψευδόμενοι Matt. v. 11), and which in the latter part of St. Luke’s Gospel almost suggests the idea of representing an earlier edition than that now in ordinary use, yet proceeding from the Evangelist’s own hand (_see_ p. 18)(305). Again, the process whereby the rough places are made plain and abrupt constructions rounded, is abundantly exemplified in the readings of the great uncial A, supported as it is by the mass of later manuscripts (e.g. Mark i. 27; Acts xv. 17, 18; xx. 24); yet in innumerable instances (_see_ Appendix to this chapter) these self-same codices retain the genuine text of the sacred writers which their more illustrious compeers have lost or impaired.