The details pertaining to the form of ancient manuscripts, their number, character, etc., belong to the department of textual criticism. The above brief notices are given to prepare the way for a statement of the evidence that we have the gospel narratives, as also the other books of the New Testament, without corruption in the form in which they were originally written. _See the PLATES at the beginning of this book._ 3. Of the autograph manuscripts proceeding immediately from the inspired authors we find no trace after the apostolic age. Here, as elsewhere, the wisdom of God has carefully guarded the church against a superstitious veneration for the merely outward instruments of redemption. We do not need the wood of the true cross that we may have redemption through the blood of Christ; nor do we need the identical manuscripts that proceeded from the apostles and their companions, since we have the contents of these manuscripts handed down to us without corruption in any essential particular. This appears from various considerations. _First._ Several hundred manuscripts of the gospels, or of portions of them, (to confine our attention at present to these,) have been examined, two of them belonging to the fourth century and two, with some fragments, to the fifth. All these, though written in different centuries and coming from widely different regions, contain essentially the same text. In them, not one of the great facts or doctrines of the gospel history is mutilated or obscured. _Secondly._ The quotations of the church fathers from the last part of the second to the end of the fourth century are so copious, that from them almost the entire text of our present gospels could be reconstructed. These quotations agree substantially with each other and with the text of our existing manuscripts; only that the earlier fathers, as already noticed, chap. 2. 3, often quote loosely from memory, blend together different narratives, and interweave with the words of Scripture their own explanatory remarks.