On reviewing the whole mass of evidence, internal and external, we submit the present as a clear instance in which the two oldest copies conspire in a false or highly improbable reading, and of a signal exemplification of the Canon, _Proclivi orationi praestat ardua_. 14. LUKE x. 41, 42. Ἑνὸς δέ ἐστι χρεία. This solemn speech of our Divine Master has shaken many a pulpit, and sanctified many a life. We might be almost content to estimate Cod. B’s claim to paramount consideration as a primary authority by the treatment this passage receives from the hand of its scribe, at least if the judgement were to rest with those who are willing to admit that a small minority, whereof B happens to form one of the members, is not necessarily in the right. Westcott and Hort in the margin of their published edition (1881) reduce the whole sentence between Μάρθα ver. 41 and Μαρία ver. 42 to the single word θορυβάζῃ, the truer reading in the place of τυρβάζῃ: in their privately circulated issue dated ten years earlier they had gone further, placing within double brackets μεριμνᾷς καί and from περὶ πολλά downwards. They could hardly do less on the principles they have adopted, while yet they feel constrained to concede that, though not belonging to the original Gospel, the excluded words do not, on the other hand, read like the invention of a paraphrast. They do not indeed: and it is when abstract theories such as modern critics have devised are subjected to so violent a strain, that we can best discern their intrinsic weakness, of which indeed these editors have here shown their consciousness by a change of mind not at all usual with them. For the grave omission indicated above we have but one class of authorities, that of the D, _a_ _b_ _e_ _ff_2 _i_ _l_, and Ambrose, the Latins omitting θορυβάζῃ too: while ἑνὸς δέ ἐστι χρεία is not found in _c_ also, and does not appear in Clement. The succeeding γάρ or δέ is of course left out by all these, and by 262, the Vulgate, Curetonian Syriac, Armenian, and Jerome. This testimony, almost purely Western, is confirmed or weakened as the case may be, by the systematic omissions of clauses towards the end of the Gospel in the same books, of which we spoke in Chap. X (_see_ p. 299, note).