Above all,--(the reader is entreated to give the subject his sustained attention),--Is it not perceived that the admission involved in the hypothesis before us is fatal to any rational pretence that the passage is of spurious origin? We have got back in thought at least to the third or fourth century of our era. We are among the Fathers and Doctors of the Eastern Church in conference assembled: and they are determining what shall be the Gospel for the great Festival of Pentecost. 'It shall begin' (say they) 'at the thirty-seventh verse of St. John vii, and conclude with the twelfth verse of St. John viii. But so much of it as relates to the breaking up of the Sanhedrin,--to the withdrawal of our Lord to the Mount of Olives,--and to His return next morning to the Temple,--had better not be read. It disturbs the unity of the narrative. So also had the incident of the woman taken in adultery better not be read. It is inappropriate to the Pentecostal Festival.' The Authors of the great Oriental Liturgy therefore admit that they find the disputed verses in their copies: and thus they vouch for their genuineness. For none will doubt that, had they regarded them as a spurious accretion to the inspired page, they would have said so plainly. Nor can it be denied that if in their corporate capacity they had disallowed these twelve verses, such an authoritative condemnation would most certainly have resulted in the perpetual exclusion from the Sacred Text of the part of these verses which was actually adopted as a Lection. What stronger testimony on the contrary can be imagined to the genuineness of any given portion of the everlasting Gospel than that it should have been canonized or recognized as part of Inspired Scripture by the collective wisdom of the Church in the third or fourth century? And no one may regard it as a suspicious circumstance that the present Pentecostal lection has been thus maimed and mutilated in respect of twelve of its verses. There is nothing at all extraordinary in the treatment which St. John vii. 37-viii. 12 has here experienced. The phenomenon is even of perpetual recurrence in the Lectionary of the East,--as will be found explained below[614].