(_e_) So far as we have gone, therefore, it appears that much uncertainty prevails regarding the text formations we have already considered—those of Lucian, Hesychius, Pamphilus, and the Ferrar Group. Considering the amount of evidence at our command—how the external testimony points in the same direction as the manuscripts themselves, and, indeed, how probable is the whole nature of the operation in question—one would expect these to be the most easily distinguishable of all. Indeed, even so cautious an enquirer as Zahn speaks without any hesitation of “the official recensions originating subsequent to the time of Origen” (_ThLbl._, 1899, 180). The vagueness of our conclusions with respect to these recensions does not look very promising for the result of our investigation of the text prior to the time of Origen, when activity in this field was more disconnected and might be said to run wild and unrestrained. And there is this further difficulty that some of the writers who fall to be considered in this period came in later times more or less justly under the imputation of heresy, with the consequence that the results of their labours were less widely disseminated, if not deliberately suppressed. In circumstances like these any attempted revision of the text must have been equally mischievous, whether it proceeded from the orthodox side or from the opposite. That there were διορθωταί who were supposed to correct the text in the interests of orthodoxy we have already learned from Epiphanius. Indeed, from our point of view the action of the orthodox correctors must be thought the more regrettable of the two, since the books without a doubt parted at their hands with many vivid, strange, and even fantastic traits of language. Even in the matter of style it seems to me incontestable that it was at their hands that the Gospels received that reserved and solemn tone which we would not now willingly part with, and which can be compared to nothing so much as to those solemn pictures of Christ that we see painted on a golden background in Byzantine churches. For myself, at least, I have not the slightest doubt that the Gospel, and the Gospel particularly, was originally narrated in a much more vivacious style. Just consider this, for example. In all our present authorities—Greek manuscripts, ancient versions, Syriac, Egyptian, and so forth, and in all the Church Fathers without exception, so far as I am aware—we read the beautiful words: “your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask Him,” πρὸ τοῦ ὑμᾶς αἰτῆσαι αὐτόν (Matt. vi. 8). Compare with this what we find singly and solely in Codex D and the Old Latin h, πρὸ τοῦ ἀνοῖξαι τὸ στόμα, antequam os aperiatis, “before ever you open your mouth.” To me it is a striking indication to what an extent the instinctive sense of originality is wanting, that a reading like this is not inserted by Westcott and Hort among their Noteworthy Rejected Readings, nor even cited by Baljon in