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278 there is good reason at the outset to doubt whether any better readings have perished with the multitudes of documents that have been lost.

363. The question however needs more careful consideration on account of the apparent ease and simplicity with which many ancient texts are edited, which might be thought, on a hasty view, to imply that the New Testament cannot be restored with equal certainty. But this ease and simplicity is in fact the mark of evidence too scanty to be tested; whereas in the variety and fullness of the evidence on which it rests the text of the New Testament stands absolutely and unapproachably alone among prose writings. For all other works of antiquity, the Old Testament (in translations) and some of the Latin poets excepted, MSS earlier than the ninth or even tenth century are of extreme rarity. Many are preserved to us in a single MS or hardly more; and so there is little chance of detecting corruption wherever the sense is good. Those only which are extant in many copies of different ages present so much as a distant analogy with the New Testament: and, if through the multitude of various readings, and the consequent diversities of printed editions, they lose the fallacious uniformity of text which is the usual result of extreme paucity of documents, there is always a nearer approximation to perfect restoration. Doubtful points are out of sight even in critical editions of classical authors merely because in ordinary literature it is seldom worth while to trouble the clearness of a page. The one disadvantage on the side of the New Testament, the early mixture of independent lines of transmission, is more than neutralised, as soon as it is distinctly perceived, by the antiquity and variety of the evidence;