Francis Lucas of Brügge was the first to explore the writings of the Church Fathers for the express purposes of textual criticism. They are referred to in four notes found in the Complutensian Polyglot. In his edition of 1516, Erasmus cites a whole series of Patristic witnesses—Ambrosius, Athanasius, Augustine, Cyprian, Gregory of Nazianzen, Origen, and Theodoret. Since that time all judicious critics have paid attention to them. Valuable service has been rendered for Tertullian by Rönsch, and for Origen by Griesbach. For Augustine, Lagarde is specially to be mentioned. Most of the Fathers were thus cared for by Burgon, who indexed the New Testament quotations in sixteen large volumes, which were deposited in the British Museum after his death. The only pity is that the works of those very Fathers that are of most importance are not yet satisfactorily edited. All the more welcome, therefore, is the appearance of the Vienna Academy’s _Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum_, of which forty volumes have been issued since 1867, and of the Berlin Academy’s edition of the Ante-Nicene Greek Fathers, of which one volume of Hippolytus and two of Origen have made their appearance.[117] The earliest Fathers are valuable chiefly for the history of the _Canon_. That is to say, their evidence must be taken simply as showing what New Testament writings they were acquainted with, and here the _argumentum ex silentio_ is to be applied with caution. This is the case with _Barnabas_ and _Clement_[118] in the first century, and _Ignatius_ and _Hermas_ in the first half of the second. Even with the much more extensive writings of _Justin_, there is still considerable dispute—_e.g._, as to what Gospels he made use of.[119] _Irenæus_ of Lyons is valuable on account of his extreme carefulness, and would be particularly so if it could be proved that he brought his New Testament with him from Smyrna[120] and if his writings were extant in Greek, and not, as is the case with most of them, in Latin only. In Egypt _Clement of Alexandria_ holds a prominent place, but by far the most distinguished of all is the great Biblical scholar of antiquity, _Origen_ (d. 248). Already we find these writers appealing to manuscripts, and distinguishing them by such epithets as “good,” “old,” “emended,” “most,” or “few.” In the case of the Ante-Nicene Fathers their locality is an important consideration, whether Antioch, Cæsarea (_Eusebius_), Egypt, Constantinople (_Chrysostom_), or Cappadocia (_Theodore_), etc. Their expositions of Scripture are preserved in the so-called =Catenæ=, or continuous commentaries, in which the interpretations of different Fathers are arranged continuously like the links of a chain. It not unfrequently happens in these Catenæ that the words of one writer are cited under the name of another. The evidence afforded by the writings of the Heretics is no less valuable, if we except those passages, which are not numerous, in which they are