(iv.) After all that has gone before, our two oldest Codices (Cod. B and Cod. א) which alone witness to the truth of Eusebius’ testimony as to the state of certain copies of the Gospels in his own day, need not detain us long. They are thought to be as old as the ivth century: they are certainly without the concluding section of S. Mark’s Gospel. But it may not be forgotten that both Codices alike are disfigured throughout by errors, interpolations and omissions without number; that their testimony is continually divergent; and that it often happens that where they both agree they are both demonstrably in error.(495) Moreover, it is a highly significant circumstance that the Vatican Codex (B), which is the more ancient of the two, exhibits _a vacant column_ at the end of S. Mark’s Gospel,—_the only vacant column in the whole codex_: whereby it is shewn that the Copyist was aware of the existence of the Twelve concluding Verses of S. Mark’s Gospel, even though he left them out:(496) while the original Scribe of the Codex Sinaiticus (א) is declared by Tischendorf to have actually _omitted the concluding verse of S. John’s Gospel_,—in which unenviable peculiarity _it stands alone among MSS._(497) (I.) And thus we are brought back to the point from which we started. We are reminded that the one thing to be accounted for is _the mutilated condition of certain copies of S. Mark’s Gospel in the beginning of the fourth century_; of which, Cod. B and Cod. א are the two solitary surviving specimens,—Eusebius, the one historical witness. We have to decide, I mean, between the _evidence_ for this _fact_,—(namely, that within the first two centuries and a-half of our æra, the Gospel according to S. Mark _suffered mutilation_;)—and the _reasonableness_ of the other _opinion_, namely, that S. Mark’s _original autograph_ extended no farther than ch. xvi. 8. All is reduced to this one issue; and unless any are prepared to prove that the Twelve familiar Verses (ver. 9 to ver. 20) with which S. Mark ends his Gospel _cannot_ be his,—(I have proved on the contrary that he must needs be thought to have written them,(498))—I submit that it is simply irrational to persist in asseverating that the reason why those verses are not found in our two Codexes of the ivth century must be because they did not exist in the original autograph of the Evangelist. What else is this but to set unsupported _opinion_, or rather unreasoning _prejudice_, before the _historical evidence_ of a _fact_? The assumption is not only gratuitous, arbitrary, groundless; but it is discountenanced by the evidence of MSS., of Versions, of Fathers, (Versions and Fathers much older than the ivth century:) is rendered in the highest degree improbable by every internal, every external consideration: is condemned by _the deliberate judgment of the universal Church_,—which, in its corporate capacity, for eighteen hundred years, in all places, has not only solemnly accepted the last Twelve Verses of S.