by no means surprising. The Armenians formerly did the same thing.
XXIII. That Basil the Great made use of rare (that is, having a few copies much resembling one another, which were peculiar in their class) manuscripts of the Epistles, is plain from the Apparatus, p. 690 ; and he lays open to us a trace of this dictum of John, when, in his fifth book against Eunomius, he says : God and the Word and the Spirit , one Deity , and alone to he adored. It is scarcely possible for more weight to be assigned to the Dialogue , which is attributed to Maximus , than is assigned to it in my Apparatus. That author undoubtedly owes his knowledge of the clause to the Latin copies of the Africans : whether he found it afterwards in Greek copies, is for the consideration of the learned.
Now I wish the reader attentively to compare together the great number of manuscripts, which Gerard of Mastricht brings together in his Notes on this passage, and the fourteen Greek witnesses which Twells enumerates in the 302d page of Wolf, and, on the other side, the things which I have supplied instead, in the 3d and subsequent paragraphs. You will say that an essential service will be rendered by him who shall prove, by any means whatever, that there are in existence even but one or two witnesses of Greek authority. He who shall bring forward credible witnesses from Greek antiquity, will deserve the gratitude of the Church.
XXY. They who defend the clause are not therefore necessarily bound to know, or to bring forward, the cause why it is wanting in so many copies. Let the cause of the omission be less certain : still the omission, and moreover the genuineness of the clause also, is certain. He who has lost and found a choice treasure, even though he knows not how it was lost, yet recognises and recovers it. The suspicion of an hiatus in this passage, arising from a similarity of ending, will, as I think, be slow in coming to an end. I fre- quently, throughout this work, notice what influence similarity of ending is accustomed to have in the production of hiatus ; but that this cause cannot possibly avail in the present instance, I have, unless I am mistaken, proved in the Apparatus, p. 765 [Ed. ii. p. 474]. But another, and not unreasonable conjecture, as to the manner in which the clause came to be expunged, is subjoined in the same place. On the other hand, it can by no means be regarded as a patch stitched on by the Latin Fathers, who are, some wanting the clause itself, others rejoicing in it ; some known, others unknown or lost ; some of great antiquity, others more recent. Indulge sus-