But not a particle of Evidence is forthcoming. It is not even pretended that any such evidence exists. Instead, we are magisterially informed by “the first Biblical Critic in Europe,”—(I desire to speak of him with gratitude and respect, but S. Mark’s Gospel is a vast deal more precious to me than Dr. Tischendorf’s reputation,)—that “_a healthy piety reclaims against the endeavours of those who are for palming off as Mark’s what the Evangelist is so plainly shewn_ [where?] _to have known nothing at all about_.”(470) In the meanwhile, it is assumed to be a more reasonable supposition,—(α) That S. Mark published an imperfect Gospel; and that the Twelve Verses with which his Gospel concludes were the fabrication of a subsequent age; than,—(β) That some ancient Scribe having with design or by accident left out these Twelve concluding Verses, copies of the second Gospel so mutilated become multiplied, and in the beginning of the ivth century existed in considerable numbers. And yet it is notorious that very soon after the Apostolic age, liberties precisely of this kind were freely taken with the text of the New Testament. Origen (A.D. 185-254) complains of the licentious tampering with the Scriptures which prevailed in his day. “Men add to them,” (he says) “or _leave out_,—as seems good to themselves.”(471) Dionysius of Corinth, yet earlier, (A.D. 168-176) remarks that it was no wonder his own writings were added to and _taken from_, seeing that men presumed to deprave the Word of GOD in the same manner.(472) Irenæus, his contemporary, (living within seventy years of S. John’s death,) complains of a corrupted Text.(473) We are able to go back yet half a century, and the depravations of Holy Writ become avowed and flagrant.(474) A competent authority has declared it “no less true to fact than paradoxical in sound, that _the worst corruptions to which the New Testament has been ever subjected_ originated within a hundred years after it was composed.”(475) Above all, it is demonstrable that Cod. B and Cod. א abound in unwarrantable omissions very like the present;(476) omissions which only do not provoke the same amount of attention because they are of less moment. One such extraordinary depravation of the Text, _in which they also stand alone among MSS._ and to which their patrons are observed to appeal with triumphant complacency, has been already made the subject of distinct investigation. I am much mistaken if it has not been shewn in my VIIth chapter, that the omission of the words ἐν Ἐφέσῳ from Ephes. i. 1, is just as unauthorized,—quite as serious a blemish,—as the suppression of S. Mark xvi. 9-20. Now, in the face of facts like these, and in the absence of _any Evidence whatever_ to prove that S. Mark’s Gospel was imperfect from the first,—I submit that an hypothesis so violent and improbable, as well as so wholly uncalled for, is simply undeserving of serious attention. For,