To this question only one answer can be returned. The exaggeration is so gross that it refutes itself. Had it been merely asserted that the verses in question were wanting in _many_ of the copies,—even had it been insisted that _the best copies_ were without them,—well and good: but to assert that, in the beginning of the fourth century, from “_almost all_” copies of the Gospels they were away,—is palpably untrue. What had become then of the MSS. from which the Syriac, the Latin, _all_ the ancient Versions were made? How is the contradictory evidence of _every copy of the Gospels in existence but two_ to be accounted for? With Irenæus and Hippolytus, with the old Latin and the Vulgate, with the Syriac, and the Gothic, and the Egyptian versions to refer to, we are able to assert that the author of such a statement was guilty of monstrous exaggeration. We are reminded of the loose and random way in which the Fathers,—(giants in Interpretation, but very children in the Science of Textual Criticism,)—are sometimes observed to speak about the state of the Text in their days. We are reminded, for instance, of the confident assertion of an ancient Critic that the true reading in S. Luke xxiv. 13 is not “three-score” but “_an hundred_ and three-score;” for that so “the accurate copies” used to read the place, besides Origen and Eusebius. And yet (as I have elsewhere explained) the reading ἑκατὸν καὶ ἑξήκοντα is altogether impossible. “Apud nos mixta sunt omnia,” is Jerome’s way of adverting to an evil which, serious as it was, was yet not nearly so great as he represents; viz. the unauthorized introduction into one Gospel of what belongs of right to another. And so in a multitude of other instances. The Fathers are, in fact, constantly observed to make critical remarks about the ancient copies which simply _cannot_ be correct.