If, as might have happened, without any miracle, the original autograph of the Gospels, as they were written by the apostles or some one else with their own hands, had been carefully preserved in the archives of the first popes, our professors would have been spared much labour. But we nowhere read that these successors and heirs of Peter showed any special solicitude for this prime duty of their office, the preservation of this precious jewel of their treasure, the New Testament. What they neglected, had therefore to be recovered by our philologists. Just as those who wished to study the Peloponnesian war resorted to the manuscripts of Thucydides, the Christian scholars, to become acquainted with the origins of Christianity, betook themselves to the manuscripts of the New Testament. And as the manuscripts of Thucydides vary widely from one another and in certain passages leave us quite helpless, so do the manuscripts of the New Testament. Bentley speaks of thirty thousand _variæ lectiones_ in the New Testament; but since his time their number must have increased fourfold. The manuscripts of the New Testament are more numerous than those of any classic. Two thousand are known and have been described, and more yet may lie buried in libraries. Now while this large number of manuscripts and various readings have given the philologists of the New Testament greater difficulties than the classical philologist encounters, still on the other hand the New Testament has the advantage over all classical texts, in that some of its manuscripts are much older than those of the majority of classical writers. We have, for instance, no complete manuscripts of Homer earlier than the thirteenth century, while the oldest manuscripts of the New Testament descend from the fourth and fifth centuries. It is frequently said that all these things are of no importance for the understanding of the New Testament, and that theologians need not trouble themselves about them. But this is saying too much. There are _variæ lectiones_, which are certainly not without importance for the facts and the doctrines of Christianity, and in which the last word belongs not to the theologian, but to the philologist. No one would say that it makes no difference if Mark xvi. 9-20 is omitted or not; no one would declare that the authenticity or spuriousness of the section on the adulteress (John vii. 53-viii. 11) was entirely indifferent. When we consider what contention there has been over the seventh verse of the fifth chapter of the first Epistle of John, and how the entire doctrine of the Trinity has been based on that (“For there are three that bear record in heaven, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost: and these three are one”), it will hardly be maintained that the manuscripts are of no importance for Christian dogma. Whether in the first Epistle to Timothy iii. 16, we read ΟΣ for ΘΣ, that is, θεός, is also not quite immaterial. Still I admit that in comparison to the problems