If you will take the trouble to compare any of the cases,--in Genesis for example,--where a conversation is first set down, and then reported by one of the speakers,--you will find that it is deemed allowable to omit or to add clauses, even when the discourse is related in the first person[368]. Something before inserted, is withheld: or something before withheld, is inserted. No discourse was probably ever set down, word for word, as it was delivered. In sacred, as in profane writings, the exact _substance_, or rather, the real _purport_, of what was spoken, very reasonably stands for what was _actually_ spoken. The difference is this;--that a narrative, by man abridged, _may_ convey a wrong impression: whereas an inspired abridgement of any history soever _cannot_ mislead. Other characteristics of an inspired narrative,--the lesser Laws of the Divine Harmony, as they may be called,--will be discovered by the attentive reader. For example, that intervening circumstances are often passed over, without any notice taken of them whatever: while yet it is singular how often the Evangelist shews himself conscious of what he omits by some very minute allusion to it[369]. This must suffice however. It would require a whole sermon, a whole volume rather, to enumerate all the features of the Evangelical method. II. The next sample of difficulty will not occupy us long. St. Matthew is charged with a bad memory, because he ascribes to "Jeremy the prophet[370]" words which are said to be found in Zechariah.--Strange that men should be heard to differ about a plain matter of fact! _I_ have never been able to find these words in Zechariah yet!... There are words _something like them_,--but not those very words, by any means,--in Zech. xi. 12. Why then is St. Matthew to be taxed with a bad memory? Are there not other prophecies quoted in the New Testament not to be found in the Old? Yes[371]. Is not the self-same prophecy sometimes found in two different prophets,--as in Isaiah and Nahum? Yes[372]. Are not some prophetic passages _common to Jeremiah and Zechariah?_ Yes[373]. The Jews even had a saying that the Spirit of the one was in the other. _Where_ then remains a pretence for supposing that St. Matthew was troubled with a bad memory?