I. It is undeniable, in the meantime, that for the last quarter of a century, it has become the fashion to demand for the readings of Codex B something very like absolute deference. The grounds for this superstitious sentiment, (for really I can describe it in no apter way,) I profess myself unable to discover. Codex B comes to us without a history: without recommendation of any kind, except that of its antiquity. It bears traces of careless transcription in every page. The mistakes which the original transcriber made are of perpetual recurrence. “They are chiefly omissions, of one, two, or three words; but sometimes of half a verse, a whole verse, or even of several verses.... I hesitate not to assert that it would be easier to find a folio containing three or four such omissions than to light on one which should be without any.”(123) In the Gospels alone, Codex B leaves out words or whole clauses no less than 1,491 times:(124) of which by far the largest proportion is found in S. Mark’s Gospel. Many of these, no doubt, are to be accounted for by the proximity of a “like ending.”(125) The Vatican MS. (like the Sinaitic(126)) was originally derived from an older Codex which contained about twelve or thirteen letters in a line.(127) And it will be found that some of its omissions which have given rise to prolonged discussion are probably to be referred to nothing else but the oscitancy of a transcriber with such a codex before him:(128) without having recourse to any more abstruse hypothesis; without any imputation of bad faith;—_certainly without supposing that the words omitted did not exist in the inspired autograph of the Evangelist_. But then it is undeniable that some of the omissions in Cod. B are not to be so explained. On the other hand, I can testify to the fact that the codex is disfigured throughout with _repetitions_. The original scribe is often found to have not only written the same words twice over, but to have failed whenever he did so to take any notice with his pen of what he had done. What then, (I must again inquire,) are the grounds for the superstitious reverence which is entertained in certain quarters for the readings of Codex B? If it be a secret known to the recent Editors of the New Testament, they have certainly contrived to keep it wondrous close.