August, 1840, for his uncle Benedict, copying from a printed Moscow Bible, and imitating the antique style, as he well knew how. This adroit rogue had before this imposed on Professor Lepsius of Berlin, and Sir Frederick Madden of the British Museum, with forgeries of ancient authors, but was detected when making a similar attempt on Mr. H. O. Coxe of the Bodleian. Simonides never, like Psalmanazar, made a clean confession of his falsehoods.' But nothing could have put them in a clearer light than a simple review of the facts. In the first place he was but fifteen years of age, according to his own. account, when he thus wrote, in less than nine months, the whole Scriptures, and two of the Apostolic Fathers besides! But this would have been a minor difficulty in his story, compared with the stupendous achievement, conceivable only by one who has looked at the work, of giving to the vellum its air of antiquity, the faint and faded look of much of the writing, the emendations in different ink and style,3 the very character of the uncials of the Herculanean papyri, and the history of Dio Cassius, and, what is least of all possible to deliberate invention, the very inaccuracies and mistakes of the manuscript. There are, for instance, in the Sinaitic MS. occasional omissions of what was evidently just a line in the papyrus column from which it was copied-such a fault as the most careful scribe might commit, but not such a fault as the most painstaking deceiver could well invent when copying from a printed text! The change of the feminine into the masculine pronoun-a most improbable reading-in

'After a rumor that he had perished by leprosy in 1867 in Alexandria, he reappeared two years later in St. Petersburg.

See F. H. Scrivener's introd. to his Collation of the Codex Sinaiticus, pp. lx-lxxii.

While in Codex B two or three such revisers can be traced, in Codex there is evidence of at least ten.

There are four of these columns on a page of the Sinaitic MS.

Codex is also full of itacisms, i.e., false spelling arising from the substitution of one vowel or diphthong for another resembling it in sound; supports nαрdiars for xapdías in 2 Cor. iii. 3. The Exouεv of Rom. v. I in is said to be excuɛv, primâ manu.

S. Mark, vi. 22; the change of naí into dia, and the transposition of 10ε in S. Mark, vii. 31; the paraphrase in S. John, ii. 3; the bold omission in S. Matt. xxiii. 35. of viov Bapaxiov; the equally bold attempts at emendation in S. Mark, xiv. 30, 68, 72 —in all of which the Codex Sinaiticus, though not absolutely alone, is slenderly supported by other manuscripts-are very unlikely to have occurred to the invention of a lad of fifteen. It has thus happened, in the providence of God, that the very weaknesses and defects of this famous manuscript of Scripture have turned into its strongest defence against the charge of imposture.

3. The third of the three great manuscripts I have undertaken to describe is the Codex Alexandrinus, or Codex A, now in the British Museum. It was sent to Charles I. of England in A.D. 1628, as a gift from the Patriarch of Constantinople, Cyril Lucar, who states, in a writing inscribed in it, that it came from Alexandria, and according to a tradition was written a little later than the date of the Council of Nice, A.D. 325. The manuscript consists of seven hundred and seventy-three vellum leaves, six hundred and thirty-nine of which comprise the Old Testament, having two columns on each side of the leaf. The Old Testament, in the Greek of the Septuagint, is complete with the exception of ten leaves, which contained I Sam. xii. 20-xiv. 9 and Psalms 1. 20-lxxx. 10. The New Testament lacks the beginning up to S. Matt. xxv.6; a leaf containing S. John, vi. 50-viii. 52; and three containing 2 Cor. iv. 13-xii. 6. Codex A contains also the only extant copy of S. Clement of Rome's epistle to the Corinthians, also a fragment of a second epistle. The vellum of this venerable manuscript has fallen into holes in places, and the ink will crumble from it at a rough touch. The uncials are elegant, but less simple in form than

1 It is said that in the four changes in these verses one old Latin copy alone has been found to go the whole way with Codex N.

2 This MS. contains also three Christian hymns, one of which is the Greek original of the Gloria in Excelsis.

those in Codices and B. It has more frequent punctuation, though this consists only of a single stop near the top of the preceding letter. A vacant space frequently occurs at the end of a paragraph, and in Codex Alexandrinus we first meet with capitals. Vermilion was freely used in the initial lines of several books, and has stood the test of time better than the ink, which in these ancient days appears to have been made only of vegetable materials. The date of Codex A is fixed lower than those assigned to B and by numerals indicating throughout the Gospels the larger Greek chapters,' in addition to the Ammonian sections and the Eusebian canons. The presence also in this manuscript of the epistle of S. Athanasius to Marcellinus on the Psalms makes it likely that it was not written before A.D. 373, when the great confessor died.

The Codex Alexandrinus furnishes the material for the earliest recension of the sacred text thoroughly applied by modern scholars, and is actually far nearer, especially in the Gospels, to the received text of later copies than any other manuscript at all comparable in antiquity. It was collated by Bentley in 1716. The Old Testament portion was published in 1786 in semi-fac-simile uncial type, and the New Testament in like manner between 1816 and 1828.

Not to be confounded with the chapters in modern Bibles, first em

ployed in the middle of century XIII.

LECTURE IV.

AUTHENTICITY AND CREDIBILITY OF THE SCRIPTURES; GENUINENESS AND

INTEGRITY.

PART II.

THE possession of three such manuscripts as we have just examined is justly estimated as of the highest value. They take us back literally over fourteen and a half centuries. Here are the very copies of Scriptures handled by Christians between A.D. 300 and A.D. 350. There can be no doubt whatever that the Bible in these venerable vellum leaves is identically the same with the Bible which Christians use to-day. Still, while this proof is perhaps the most direct and striking, it is obviously not the only proof, nor even the strongest proof of the same fact that might be given. All three manuscripts might be destroyed, and yet the existence of the same Scriptures, at the time they were written, could be established on perfectly conclusive evidence. They are, after all, but three out of nearly a hundred uncial manuscripts still in existence; and the uncials themselves constitute but a fraction of two thousand manuscripts, representing every century from the fifth downward, and almost every civilized country of the known world. It is true that many of the MSS. are merely fragments; and perhaps one-half, or one thousand, belong to the class of what are called Lectionaries, or portions of Scripture appointed to be read in church. But this very fact reminds us of and attests for

us a truth of the highest interest and value; viz., the unity and supreme worth of the whole volume thus preserved in fragments, and the defence which its very dispersion provided against both its destruction and its corruption. And yet, again, we are not to forget that these two thousand Greek MSS. are not themselves the only evidence that we have the very Scriptures that came from the hands of apostles and evangelists. Were every Greek manuscript burned to-day, the Scriptures could be restored in their integrity from versions in various languages, old and new, and from quotations contained in a multitude of authors of every age and land.

But the possession of three such MSS. as the Vatican, the Sinaitic, and the Alexandrian renders the employment of the collateral aid of versions and quotations entirely superfluous for the whole period between this and the first half of the fourth century in establishing the authenticity and credibility of the sacred books. The work before us is therefore much abridged. We have to inquire simply, Upon what evidence did the Christians of the fourth century identify the books of these venerable MSS. with the writings left by the evangelists and apostles? When we realize that the vellum volumes upon which we look to-day in the VatiIcan and the British Museum were written not more than two hundred and twenty-five or two hundred and fifty years after the death of S. John-a period not so great as that which already separates us from the death of Shakespeare or Spenser or Lord Bacon-we may feel that the question of authorship is not one that should be necessarily thought doubtful or even difficult. No one doubts the authenticity of a multitude of famous writings of much older date, and unsupported by a hundredth part of the evidence. Even if a foolish question like that of the authenticity of Shakespeare's plays chance to be mooted, it is more likely to be on the ground of some fanciful theory than upon the well-known fact that some of the most celebrated of his plays were printed, not