This whole province is beset with difficulties: and the matter is in itself wondrously obscure. I do not suppose, in the absence of any evidence direct or indirect on the subject,--at all events I am not aware--that at any time has there been one definite authoritative attempt made by the Universal Church in her corporate capacity to remodel or revise the Text of the Gospels. An attentive study of the phenomena leads me, on the contrary, to believe that the several corruptions of the text were effected at different times, and took their beginning in widely different ways. I suspect that Accident was the parent of many; and well meant critical assiduity of more. Zeal for the Truth is accountable for not a few depravations: and the Church's Liturgical and Lectionary practice must insensibly have produced others. Systematic villainy I am persuaded has had no part or lot in the matter. The decrees of such an one as Origen, if there ever was another like him, will account for a strange number of aberrations from the Truth: and if the Diatessaron of Tatian could be recovered[184], I suspect that we should behold there the germs at least of as many more. But, I repeat my conviction that, however they may have originated, the causes [are not to be found in bad principle, but either in infirmities or influences which actuated scribes unconsciously, or in a want of understanding as to what is the Church's duty in the transmission from generation to generation of the sacred deposit committed to her enlightened care.] Sec. 2. 1. When we speak of Assimilation, we do not mean that a writer while engaged in transcribing one Gospel was so completely beguiled and overmastered by his recollections of the parallel place in another Gospel,--that, forsaking the expressions proper to the passage before him, he unconsciously adopted the language which properly belongs to a different Evangelist. That to a very limited extent this may have occasionally taken place, I am not concerned to deny: but it would argue incredible inattention to what he was professing to copy, on the one hand,--astonishing familiarity with what he was not professing to copy, on the other,--that a scribe should have been capable of offending largely in this way. But in fact a moderate acquaintance with the subject is enough to convince any thoughtful person that the corruptions in MSS. which have resulted from accidental Assimilation must needs be inconsiderable in bulk, as well as few in number. At all events, the phenomenon referred to, when we speak of 'Assimilation,' is not to be so accounted for: it must needs be explained in some entirely different way. Let me make my meaning plain: (_a_) We shall probably be agreed that when the scribe of Cod. [Symbol: Aleph], in place of [Greek: basanisai hemas] (in St. Matt. viii. 29), writes [Greek: hemas apolesai],--it may have been his memory which misled him. He may have been merely thinking of St. Mark i. 24, or of St. Luke iv. 34.