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126 and degrees occur in the texts of some of the earliest post-apostolic Christian writings, as the Epistle of Barnabas and the Shepherd of Hermas; and even the interpolations of the Ignatian Epistles are to a certain extent of the same kind. In the Christian 'apocryphal' or legendary literature, some of which, in its elements if not in its present shape, is undoubtedly as old as the second century, much of the extraordinary diversity in different MSS can only be explained by a hardly credible laxity of idea and practice in the transmission of texts. Some at least of the writings here mentioned, if not all of them, had a large popular currency: and it is probably to similar conditions of use and multiplication, prevailing during the time of the slow process by which the books of the New Testament at last came to be placed on the same footing as those of the Old, that we must look for a natural explanation of the characteristics of their Western texts. In surveying a long succession of Western readings by the side of others, we seem to be in the presence of a vigorous and popular ecclesiastical life, little scrupulous as to the letter of venerated writings, or as to their permanent function in the future, in comparison with supposed fitness for immediate and obvious edification.

B.&ensp;177—180.&emsp;The neutral text and its preservation

177. We now proceed to other Pre-Syrian texts. If it be true, as we have found reason to believe, first, that during that part of the Ante-Nicene period of which we have any direct knowledge 'Western' texts were at least dominant in most churches of both East and West, and secondly, that, whatever may be the merits of individual