Do any inquire, How then has all this contradiction and depravation of Codexes [Symbol: Aleph]ABC(D) come about? I answer as follows:-- It was a favourite tenet with the Gnostic heretics that the Law and the Gospel are at variance. In order to establish this, Marcion (in a work called Antitheses) set passages of the New Testament against passages of the Old; from the seeming disagreement between which his followers were taught to infer that the Law and the Gospel cannot have proceeded from one and the same author[567]. Now here was a place exactly suited to his purpose. The God of the Old Testament had twice sent down fire from heaven to consume fifty men. But 'the Son of Man,' said our Saviour, when invited to do the like, 'came not to destroy men's lives but to save them.' Accordingly, Tertullian in his fourth book against Marcion, refuting this teaching, acquaints us that one of Marcion's 'Contrasts' was Elijah's severity in calling down fire from Heaven,--and the gentleness of Christ. 'I acknowledge the seventy of the judge,' Tertullian replies; 'but I recognize the same severity on the part of Christ towards His Disciples when they proposed to bring down a similar calamity on a Samaritan village[568].' From all of which it is plain that within seventy years of the time when the Gospel was published, the text of St. Luke ix. 54-6 stood very much as at present. But then it is further discovered that at the same remote period (about A.D. 130) this place of Scripture was much fastened on by the enemies of the Gospel. The Manichaean heretics pressed believers with it[569]. The disciples' appeal to the example of Elijah, and the reproof they incurred, became inconvenient facts. The consequence might be foreseen. With commendable solicitude for God's honour, but through mistaken piety, certain of the orthodox (without suspicion of the evil they were committing) were so ill-advised as to erase from their copies the twenty-four words which had been turned to mischievous account as well as to cause copies to be made of the books so mutilated: and behold, at the end of 1,700 years, the calamitous result! Of these three clauses then, which are closely interdependent, and as Tischendorf admits[570] must all three stand or all three fall together, the first is found with ACD, the Old Latin, Peshitto, Clement, Chrysostom, Cyril, Jerome,--not with [Symbol: Aleph]B the Vulgate or Curetonian. The second and third clauses are found with Old Latin, Vulgate, Peshitto, Harkleian, six Greek and five Latin Fathers,--not with [Symbol: Aleph]ABCD.