add, corrupt copy? The same Critics are reminded that in the same four Codexes [commonly called the Ferrar Group] 'the agony and bloody sweat' (St. Luke xxii. 43, 44) is found thrust into St. Matthew's Gospel between ch. xxvi. 39 and 40. Such licentiousness on the part of a solitary exemplar of the Gospels no more affects the proper place of these or of those verses than the superfluous digits of a certain man of Gath avail to disturb the induction that to either hand of a human being appertain but five fingers, and to either foot but five toes. It must be admitted then that as far back as testimony reaches the passage under discussion stood where it now stands in St. John's Gospel. And this is my first position. But indeed, to be candid, hardly any one has seriously called that fact in question. No, nor do any (except Dr. Hort[610]) doubt that the passage is also of the remotest antiquity. Adverse Critics do but insist that however ancient, it must needs be of spurious origin: or else that it is an afterthought of the Evangelist:--concerning both which imaginations we shall have a few words to offer by-and-by. It clearly follows,--indeed it may be said with truth that it only remains,--to inquire what may have led to its so frequent exclusion from the sacred Text? For really the difficulty has already resolved itself into that. And on this head, it is idle to affect perplexity. In the earliest age of all,--the age which was familiar with the universal decay of heathen virtue, but which had not yet witnessed the power of the Gospel to fashion society afresh, and to build up domestic life on a new and more enduring basis;--at a time when the greatest laxity of morals prevailed, and the enemies of the Gospel were known to be on the look out for grounds of cavil against Christianity and its Author;--what wonder if some were found to remove the _pericope de adultera_ from their copies, lest it should be pleaded in extenuation of breaches of the seventh commandment? The very subject-matter, I say, of St. John viii. 3-11 would sufficiently account for the occasional omission of those nine verses. Moral considerations abundantly explain what is found to have here and there happened. But in fact this is not a mere conjecture of my own. It is the reason assigned by Augustine for the erasure of these twelve verses from many copies of the Gospel[611]. Ambrose, a quarter of a century earlier, had clearly intimated that danger was popularly apprehended from this quarter[612]: while Nicon, five centuries later, states plainly that the mischievous tendency of the narrative was the cause why it had been expunged from the Armenian version[613]. Accordingly, just a few Greek copies are still to be found mutilated in respect of those nine verses only. But in fact the indications are not a few that all the twelve verses under discussion did not by any means labour under the same degree of disrepute. The first three (as I shewed