_Seventh._—Constantine, their successor, in the year 331, caused fifty copies of the Scriptures to be made for Byzantium, under the care of Eusebius of Cæsarea, the church historian. The manuscript discovered by the celebrated Tischendorf, in 1859, at the convent of St. Catherine, on Mount Sinai, is believed to be one of those copies, and to be the oldest[10] Greek manuscript in existence. _If_ one of the fifty, it is more than fifteen hundred years old. It is called the Sinaitic Codex. The second rank belongs to the Vatican Codex. Its date is probably not later than the fourth century. The next in the order of time is the Alexandrian Codex. Its date is the latter part of the fourth century or the beginning of the fifth century. The Vatican has been in the Vatican Library since 1445. The Alexandrian was sent, in 1628, by the Patriarch of Constantinople, to Charles I., and is now in the British Museum. The Sinaitic was presented by its discoverer to the Emperor of Russia. There is no doubt whatever that these three manuscripts were written back of the “dark ages,” and at a time when the true text could be known with great exactness, and was comparatively free from errors. With these, there are fifty manuscripts that are a thousand years old. There are, it is estimated, more than seventeen hundred manuscripts of the whole, or portions, of the New Testament, ranging in date from the fourth to the sixteenth century. Providence, says Tischendorf, has ordained for the New Testament more sources of the greatest antiquity than are possessed by all the old Greek literature put together. The number of manuscripts of the Greek Classics, says[11] Professor Stowe, is very small compared with the Greek Testament manuscripts, and the oldest of them scarcely reaches nine hundred years. There are such differences between the Sinaitic, Vatican, and Alexandrian manuscripts as indicate that no two of them were taken from the same original. A little reflection will convince any one, that while no single copy may be literally exact from its original, the multiplication of copies adds greatly to substantial accuracy as the result of the whole. For although there is a tendency to a repetition of _some_ errors, by different copyists from the same original, as where successive sentences end with the same word, yet, in general, different copyists would make different errors, one in one part of the instrument, and the other in another, and, where the copies are numerous, they mutually correct each other. So it happens that in the different manuscripts of the New Testament, with different readings of many thousands (counting all trifles, like the omission to dot an _i_ or cross a _t_ in English chirography, as different readings), there is substantial agreement. It is a fact to be emphasized, says[12] Professor Fisher, “that the Scriptures are almost utterly free from wilful corruption;” and he endorses the opinion of the great critic, Bentley,