at the outset) clearly belong to a different category from the last nine,--a circumstance which has been too much overlooked. The Church in the meantime for an obvious reason had made choice of St. John vii. 37-viii. 12--the greater part of which is clearly descriptive of what happened at the Feast of Tabernacles--for her Pentecostal lesson: and judged it expedient, besides omitting as inappropriate to the occasion the incident of the woman taken in adultery, to ignore also the three preceding verses;--making the severance begin, in fact, as far back as the end of ch. vii. 52. The reason for this is plain. In this way the allusion to a certain departure at night, and return early next morning (St. John vii. 53: viii. 1), was avoided, which entirely marred the effect of the lection as the history of a day of great and special solemnity,--'the great day of the Feast.' And thus it happens that the gospel for the day of Pentecost was made to proceed directly from 'Search and look: for out of Galilee ariseth no prophet,' in ch. vii. 52,--to 'Then spake Jesus unto them, saying, I am the light of the world,' in ch. viii. 12; with which it ends. In other words, an omission which owed its beginning to a moral scruple was eventually extended for a liturgical consideration; and resulted in severing twelve verses of St. John's Gospel--ch. vii. 53 to viii. 11--from their lawful context. We may now proceed to the consideration of my second proposition, which is (2) _That by the very construction of her Lectionary, the Church in her corporate capacity and official character has solemnly recognised the narrative in question as an integral part of St. John's Gospel, and as standing in its traditional place, from an exceedingly remote time_. Take into your hands at random the first MS. copy of St. John's Gospel which presents itself, and turn to the place in question. Nay, I will instance _all_ the four Evangelia which I call mine,--all the seventeen which belong to Lord Zouch,--all the thirty-nine which Baroness Burdett-Coutts imported from Epirus in 1870-2. Now all these copies--(and nearly each of them represents a different line of ancestry)--are found to contain the verses in question. How did the verses ever get there?