training than might be supposed. In its absence unconscious passes further into conscious mental action; and thus transcription may come to include tolerably free modification of language and even rearrangement of material. Transcription of this kind need involve no deliberate preference of sense to language; the intention is still to transcribe language: but, as there is no special concentration of regard upon the language as having an intrinsic sacredness of whatever kind, the instinctive feeling for sense cooperates largely in the result.
11. It was predominantly though not exclusively under such conditions as these last that the transcription of the New Testament was carried on during the earliest centuries, as a comparison of the texts of that period proves beyond doubt. The conception of new Scriptures standing on the same footing as the Scriptures of the Old Testament was slow and unequal in its growth, more especially while the traditions of the apostolic and immediately succeeding generations still lived; and the reverence paid to the apostolic writings, even to the most highly and most widely venerated among them, was not of a kind that exacted a scrupulous jealousy as to their text as distinguished from their substance. As was to be expected, the language of the historical books was treated with more freedom than the rest: but even the Epistles, and still more the Apocalypse, bear abundant traces of a similar type of transcription. After a while changed feelings and changed circumstances put an end to the early textual laxity, and thenceforward its occurrence is altogether exceptional; so that the later corruptions are almost wholly those incident to transcription in the proper sense, errors arising from careless performance of a scribe's work, not from an imperfect conception of it.
