224 



tliat it is scarcely to be expected, that this, alone, sliould 

 have escaped the exertions of interested research, exercised 

 ingenuity, active zeal, and unsubdued industry; — that it 

 should have crept into all the versions and MSS. and para- 

 phrases — that the Greek and the Latin churches, tlie Orien- 

 tal and the Western Christians, othcruise, the most remote 

 and discordant in their rituals and sentiments, in their dog- 

 mas and their traditions, in their epochs and their chronology, 

 should be unitbrni and concordant in that alone — that in the 

 third century, the reading should have been so ancient, or so 

 extended, as to escape the researches of Eusebius and St. 

 Jerome ; and in the first, should seem to have been acknow- 

 ledged and paraphrased by Africanus; and yet that it is a 

 spurious interpolation, founded on traditional hypothesis, 

 and introduced not long before that period ; is, surely, 

 irreconcileable to any known principles of criticism and in- 

 vestigation ;— perhaps I should not go too far in stating, 

 that there is not in the Scriptural records, any passage of 

 merely chronological importance, the authenticity of which 

 is so clear and well established. But when in addition to all 

 this, we find that the present reading of the Septuagint (440) 

 is as old as Eusebius, and probably as Origen ; and when 

 we recollect, that Eusebius himself, after delivering his ob- 

 jections against reckoning the judges and servitudes exclu- 

 sively successive; remarks, " *and therefore the reading of the 



1 Kings 



• I paraphrase his language from memory, but his meaning is preserved; he prefers 

 the Hebrew reading, and adopts it in his Chronicon, 



