| 487 of the Holy Scriptures, and then judged upon its comparative merit. The year 1867 Will be remembered in
"Tis a medium and middle way that ought to be followed, according to the opinion of the fathers, who have acknowledged that there may be some books divinely inspired, and others of human composition among those that are cited in the canonical books. . . . It cannot be said that no fault has crept into the scriptures by the negligence or inadvertency of the transcribers, or even by the BOLDNESS of those who have ventured to strike out, ADD, or change some words which they thought necessary to be omitted, added, or changed. This is the common fate of all books, from which God has not thought fit to exempt even the sacred writings. From hence have proceeded those various and different lections between the Greek copies of the books of the New Testament, which began to appear in the first ages of the church, and are still continued."
Says Dupin: "We do not find that the two greatest men of the church, I mean Origen and St. Hierom, who had searched the ancient copies of the scriptures with so much care and diligence, and have visited so many churches in the East, have ever spoken of the originals of the New Testament, written with the hands of the apostles, which they would not have failed to do if there had been any in their time." To account for this, Dupin continues, "But it hath been already made to appear, elsewhere, that it is no wonder that the primitive Christians, who had not a regular body of a state in which they lived, and whose assemblies, on the contrary, were furiously disturbed by the Jews and pagans, had lost the originals of their books." From the same work we take the following: "In the primitive ages there was no talk of reading the Holy Scriptures in the originals; any copy whatever, provided it was used in the orthodox churches, might be relied upon as if it had been the first original, written with the hands of the apostles."
Dupin continues: "The critics have sometimes reformed the text, because they looked upon it as faulty; they have met with a sense that shocked them in the text, and which might be reformed by taking away one single word; they have determined that the text ought to read so and so, and have boldly corrected the text upon a mere conjecture. The copiers or the regulators of the copies have taken a great deal of liberty upon this respect being pursued-that they should do some service in explaining it more clearly, but sometimes have determined the text by such words as give it quite another sense."
"St. Chrysostom observes: The Jews having been at some times careless and negligent, and at other times profane, they suffered some of the sacred books to be lost through their carelessness, and have burnt and destroyed others."-Simons' Crit. Hist. N. Text.
"The common version of the Bible was printed in A. D. 1611. The only printed editions of the Greek Testament at that time were Cardinal Ximenes', printed A. D., 1514; Erasmus', in 1516; Stephens', 1546, and Beza's, in 1562, with some editions taken from these, substantially the same may be said of the Old Testament. King James' Translation was made from no uniform edition whatever. Although there is, by authority, a standard English edition of the Bible, there is no standard Hebrew or Greek text for the original of that version. That called the 'received text,' is the text of Erasmus, which is a version of the Latin Vulgate compared with the Greek text. This edition was corrected severally, by Stephens, Beza, and Elzevir, and published by the latter, at Leyden, in Holland, in 1624, thirteen years after King James' translation was published. In the compilation of this 'received text,' Erasmus consulted but eight manuscripts, only one of Revelation; all
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