If, then, for the sake of simplicity, we take as our goal the first manuscript of the Tetraevangelium, one would think it must be possible with the means at our command gradually to work back to it. Even the latest of our manuscripts is surely copied from an earlier one, and that one from another, and so on always further and further back, so that all we have to do is to establish their genealogy, pretty much as Reuss has done for the printed editions of the New Testament; and seeing we have manuscripts as old as the fourth and fifth century, that means that the entire period of a thousand years prior to the invention of printing is bridged over at once, so that the task would appear to be simply that of throwing a bridge over the first few centuries of the Christian era. And by going on comparing the witnesses and always eliminating those that prove unreliable, it must be possible, one would suppose, in this way to arrive at the original. But a little experience will shortly moderate our expectations. At the outset it is very much against us that we have no really serviceable text for comparison. The text of our present critical editions is a patchwork of many colours, more wonderful than the cloak of Child Roland of old. In fact it is a text that never really existed at all. In the preparation of my _Supplement_, which I undertook with the object of making the text of Codex Bezae easily accessible to every one, I compared the text of that manuscript with that of Tischendorf-Gebhardt’s edition, and I saw clearly that my work would necessarily present a very confused appearance indeed. I also issued an interleaved edition of my Stuttgart New Testament with a similar object—viz. to furnish a convenient means of comparing the text of manuscripts and of Patristic quotations, but that, too, labours under the same disadvantage. Whoever intends really to further the textual criticism of the New Testament will have to issue a copy of a single manuscript printed in such a way as will make it practically convenient for the comparison of different texts, something like Tischendorf’s edition of Codex Sinaiticus (_Novum Testamentum Sinaiticum_, 1863), which, however, is of little use for other purposes, or like Schjøtt’s edition of the New Testament (see above, p. 24). But as these are in the hands of very few, there is nothing for it at present but to take one of our most common texts, always bearing in mind its composite character. This feature of the text appears at the very outset in the title. In א B (D) it is κατα Μαθθαιον. Codex D is defective at the beginning down to c. i. 20, but κατ Μαθθαιον is found regularly as the title at the top of the pages, a fact which Tischendorf has overlooked. Most other manuscripts, C E K M etc., have Ευαγγελιον κατα Ματθαιον. If this latter is held as incorrect, then all these manuscripts should for the future be dropped out of account and א B D alone be regarded as authoritative.