1. Let it be freely admitted that what precedes is calculated at first sight to occasion nothing but surprise and perplexity. For, in the first place, there really is _no problem to solve_. The discrepancy suggested by “Marinus” at the outset, is plainly imaginary, the result (chiefly) of a strange misconception of the meaning of the Evangelist’s Greek,—as in fact no one was ever better aware than Eusebius himself. “These places of the Gospels would never have occasioned any difficulty,” he writes in the very next page, (but it is the commencement of his reply to the _second_ question of Marinus,)—“if people would but abstain from assuming that Matthew’s phrase (ὀψὲ σαββάτων) refers to _the evening of the Sabbath-day_: whereas, (in conformity with the established idiom of the language,) it obviously refers to an advanced period of the ensuing night.”(88) He proceeds:—“The self-same moment therefore, or very nearly the self-same, is intended by the Evangelists, only under different names: and there is no discrepancy whatever between Matthew’s,—‘in the end of the Sabbath, as it began to dawn toward the first day of the week,’ and John’s—‘The first day of the week cometh Mary Magdalen early, when it was yet dark.’ The Evangelists indicate by different expressions one and the same moment of time, but in a broad and general way.” And yet, if Eusebius knew all this so well, why did he not say so at once, and close the discussion? I really cannot tell; except on one hypothesis,—which, although at first it may sound somewhat extraordinary, the more I think of the matter, recommends itself to my acceptance the more. I suspect, then, that the discussion we have just been listening to, is, essentially, _not an original production_: but that Eusebius, having met with the suggestion in some older writer, (in Origen probably,) reproduced it in language of his own,—doubtless because he thought it ingenious and interesting, but not by any means because he regarded it as true. Except on some such theory, I am utterly unable to understand how Eusebius can have written so inconsistently. His admirable remarks just quoted, are obviously a full and sufficient answer,—the proper answer in fact,—to the proposed difficulty: and it is a memorable circumstance that the ancients generally were so sensible of this, that they are found to have _invariably_(89) substituted what Eusebius wrote in reply to the _second_ question of Marinus for what he wrote in reply to _the first_; in other words, for the dissertation which is occasioning us all this difficulty.