(_e_) But I should have been willing to go further. I might have been disposed to admit that when [Symbol: Aleph]DL introduce into St. Matt. x. 12 the clause [Greek: legontes, eirene to oiko touto] (which last four words confessedly belong exclusively to St. Luke x. 5), the author of the depraved original from which [Symbol: Aleph]DL were derived may have been only yielding to the suggestions of an inconveniently good memory:--may have succeeded in convincing himself from what follows in verse 13 that St. Matthew must have written, 'Peace be to this house;' though he found no such words in St. Matthew's text. And so, with the best intentions, he may most probably have inserted them. (_f_) Again. When [Symbol: Aleph] and Evan. 61 thrust into St. Matt. ix. 34 (from the parallel place in St. Luke viii. 53) the clause [Greek: eidotes hoti apethanen], it is of course conceivable that the authors of those copies were merely the victims of excessive familiarity with the third Gospel. But then,--although we are ready to make every allowance that we possibly can for memories so singularly constituted, and to imagine a set of inattentive scribes open to inducements to recollect or imagine instead of copying, and possessed of an inconvenient familiarity with one particular Gospel,--it is clear that our complaisance must stop somewhere. Instances of this kind of licence at last breed suspicion. Systematic 'assimilation' cannot be the effect of accident. Considerable interpolations must of course be intentional. The discovery that Cod. D, for example, introduces at the end of St. Luke v. 14 thirty-two words from St. Mark's Gospel (i. 45--ii. 1, [Greek: ho de exelthon] down to [Greek: Kapharnaoum]), opens our eyes. This wholesale importation suggests the inquiry,--How did it come about? We look further, and we find that Cod. D abounds in instances of 'Assimilation' so unmistakably intentional, that this speedily becomes the only question, How may all these depravations of the sacred text be most satisfactorily accounted for? [And the answer is evidently found in the existence of extreme licentiousness in the scribe or scribes responsible for Codex D, being the product of ignorance and carelessness combined with such looseness of principle, as permitted the exercise of direct attempts to improve the sacred Text by the introduction of passages from the three remaining Gospels and by other alterations.] Sec. 3. Sometimes indeed the true Text bears witness to itself, as may be seen in the next example.