Calamitous however it is, that what the Church has long since deliberately refused to part with should, at the end of so many centuries, by Lachmann and Tregelles and Tischendorf, by Alford and Westcott and Hort, be resolutely thrust out of place; and indeed excluded from the Sacred Text by a majority of the Revisers.
[A very interesting instance of such Harmonistic Influence may be found in the substitution of 'wine' ([Greek: oinon]) for vinegar ([Greek: oxos]), respecting which the details are given in the second Appendix to the Traditional Text.] [Observe yet another instance of harmonizing propensities in the Ancient Church.] In St.Luke's Gospel iv.

1-13, no less than six copies of the Old Latin versions (b c f g^{1} l q) besides Ambrose (Com.

St.Luke, 1340), are observed to transpose the second and third temptations; introducing verses 9-12 between verses 4 and 5; in order to make the history of the Temptation as given by St.Luke correspond with the account given by St.
Matthew.
The scribe of the Vercelli Codex (a) was about to do the same thing; but he checked himself when he had got as far as 'the pinnacle of the temple,'-- which he seems to have thought as good a scene for the third temptation as 'a high mountain,' and so left it.
Sec.

3.
A favourite, and certainly a plausible, method of accounting for the presence of unauthorized matter in MSS.

is to suggest that, in the first instance, it probably existed only in the shape of a marginal gloss, which through the inadvertence of the scribes, in process of time, found its way into the sacred text.