CHAPTER VII.
CAUSES OF CORRUPTION CHIEFLY INTENTIONAL.
I.Harmonistic Influence.
[It must not be imagined that all the causes of the depravation of the text of Holy Scripture were instinctive, and that mistakes arose solely because scribes were overcome by personal infirmity, or were unconsciously the victims of surrounding circumstances.

There was often more design and method in their error.

They, or those who directed them, wished sometimes to correct and improve the copy or copies before them.
And indeed occasionally they desired to make the Holy Scriptures witness to their own peculiar belief.

Or they had their ideas of taste, and did not scruple to alter passages to suit what they fancied was their enlightened judgement.
Thus we can trace a tendency to bring the Four Records into one harmonious narrative, or at least to excise or vary statements in one Gospel which appeared to conflict with parallel statements in another.
Or else, some Evangelical Diatessaron, or Harmony, or combined narrative now forgotten, exercised an influence over them, and whether consciously or not,--since it is difficult always to keep designed and unintentional mistakes apart, and we must not be supposed to aim at scientific exactness in the arrangement adopted in this analysis,--induced them to adopt alterations of the pure Text.
We now advance to some instances which will severally and conjointly explain themselves.] Sec.

1.
Nothing can be more exquisitely precise than St.John's way of describing an incident to which St.Mark (xvi.