(_b_) It is high time however to point out that, after all, the question to be decided is, not _what Eusebius thought_ on this subject, but what is historically probable. As a plain matter of fact, the sum of the Patristic Evidence against these Verses is the hypothetical suggestion of Eusebius already quoted; which, (after a fashion well understood by those who have given any attention to these studies), is observed to have rapidly propagated itself in the congenial soil of the vth century. And even if it could be shewn that Eusebius deliberately _rejected_ this portion of Scripture, (which has never been done,)—yet, inasmuch as it may be regarded as certain that those famous codices in the library of his friend Pamphilus at Cæsarea, to which the ancients habitually referred, _recognised it as genuine_,(489)—the only sufferer from such a conflict of evidence would surely be Eusebius himself: (not _S. Mark_, I say, but _Eusebius_:) who is observed to employ an incorrect text of Scripture on many other occasions; and must (in such case) be held to have been unduly partial to copies of S. Mark in the mutilated condition of Cod. B or Cod. א. His words were translated by Jerome;(490) adopted by Hesychius;(491) referred to by Victor;(492) reproduced “with a difference” in more than one ancient scholion.(493) But they are found to have died away into a very faint echo when Euthymius Zigabenus(494) rehearsed them for the last time in his Commentary on the Gospels, A.D. 1116. Exaggerated and misunderstood, behold them resuscitated after an interval of seven centuries by Griesbach, and Tischendorf, and Tregelles and the rest: again destined to fall into a congenial, though very differently prepared soil; and again destined (I venture to predict) to die out and soon to be forgotten for ever.