The blessed words are distributed, after the Hebrew fashion, into a stanza consisting of three members. In the first and second lines heaven and earth are contrasted; the third refers to both those preceding, and alleges the efficient cause which has brought God glory and earth peace. By the addition of a single letter to the end of the last line, by merely reading εὐδοκίας for εὐδοκία, the rhythmical arrangement is utterly marred(368), and the simple shepherds are sent away with a message, the diction of which no scholar has yet construed to his own mind(369). Yet such is the conclusion of Lachmann, Tischendorf, Tregelles, Westcott and Hort, although Tregelles and the Cambridge fellow-workers allow εὐδοκία a place in their margins. Of the five great uncials C is unfortunately defective, but א*AB*D, and no other Greek manuscript whatever, read εὐδοκίας: yet A is so inconstant in this matter that in the primitive 14th or Morning Hymn, a cento of Scripture texts, annexed to the Book of Psalms, its reading is εὐδοκεία (Baber, Cod. Alex., p. 569), and such was no doubt the form used in Divine service, as appears from the great Zürich Psalter Od. The rest of the uncials extant (אcB3EGHKLMPSUVΓΔΛΞ, &c.), and all the cursives follow the common text, which is upheld by the Bohairic, by the three extant Syriac (the Peshitto most emphatically, the Jerusalem, and the Harkleian both in the text and Greek margin), by the Armenian and Ethiopic versions. The Vulgate, as is well known, renders “in hominibus bonae voluntatis,” and thus did all the forms of the Old Latin, and after it the Gothic. Hence it follows, as a matter of course, that the Latin Fathers, such as Hilary and Augustine, and the Latin interpreters of Irenaeus (who seems really to have omitted ἐν, as do D and a few cursives) and of the false Athanasius, adopted the reading of their own Bibles. Origen also, in a passage not now extant in the Greek, is made in Jerome’s translation of it manifestly to choose the same form. We can only say that in so doing he is the only Greek who favours εὐδοκίας, and his own text has εὐδοκία in three several places, though no special stress is laid by him upon it. But here comes in the evidence of the Greek Fathers—their virtually unanimous evidence—with an authority from which there is, or ought to be, no appeal. Dean Burgon (The Revision Revised, pp. 42-46) affords us a list of forty-seven, all speaking in a manner too plain for doubt, most of them several times over, twenty-two of them having flourished before the end of the fifth century, and who must have used codices at least as old and pure as א or B. They are Irenaeus, of the second century; the Apostolical Constitutions and Origen three times in the third; Eusebius, Aphraates the Persian, Titus of Bostra, Didymus, Gregory Nazianzen, Cyril of Jerusalem (who has been quoted in error on the wrong side), Epiphanius, Gregory of Nyssa four times, Ephraem Syrus, Philo