2.
Indeed, the high antiquity of the Church's Lectionary System is inferred with certainty from many a textual phenomenon with which students of Textual Science are familiar.
It may be helpful to a beginner if I introduce to his notice the class of readings to be discussed in the present chapter, by inviting his attention to the first words of the Gospel for St.Philip and St.James' Day in our own English Book of Common Prayer,--'And Jesus said unto His disciples.' Those words he sees at a glance are undeniably nothing else but an Ecclesiastical accretion to the Gospel,--words which breed offence in no quarter, and occasion error to none.

They have nevertheless stood prefixed to St.John xiv.

1 from an exceedingly remote period; for, besides establishing themselves in every Lectionary of the ancient Church[154], they are found in Cod.

D[155],--in copies of the Old Latin[156] as the Vercellensis, Corbeiensis, Aureus, Bezae,--and in copies of the Vulgate.

They may be of the second or third, they must be as old as the fourth century.