though the series of editions which can be said to approximate to a true text of the New Testament begins in 1831, the preliminary studies of the eighteenth century, unduly neglected since the earlier part of the present century, form the necessary introduction to all secure progress hereafter. It will be sufficient to mark the most salient points in the progress of criticism.
245. Mill led the way in 1707 not only by his ample collection of documentary evidence but by his comprehensive examination of individual documents, seldom rising above the wilderness of multitudinous details, yet full of sagacious observations. He incidentally noticed the value of the concurrence of Latin evidence with A, the most conspicuous and the only complete representative of an ancient Non-Western Greek text then sufficiently known; and this glimpse of genealogical method was not lost upon Bentley, who with clear and deliberate purpose made Greek and Latin consent the guiding principle of his own project for a restoration of the text. The actual project fell to the ground until it was revived and carried out in Lachmann's edition of 1831, the starting point of the later period; in which however it assumed a somewhat different shape through the substitution of the Old Latin for the Vulgate Latin, and the ranging of the Greek Western uncials on the Latin or, as it was more properly called, the 'Western' side. But the principle itself was received at once into fruitful soil, and contributed more than any other antecedent to the criticism of the intervening period.
246. How deeply the value of the principle, as set forth in Bentley's Proposals of 1720, impressed Bengel, although he accepted it only in part, is evident from many pages of his Introduction of 1734. Bengel himself pointed out the deceptiveness of numerical superiority detached from variety of origin, prepared for sifting the confused mass of Greek MSS by casting upon it, as he said, the Versions and Fathers as an additional heap, and endeavoured to classify the documents known to him according to their presumed derivation from ancient texts. He divided them into two great 'nations' or 'families', the 'Asiatic' and the 'African', answering roughly to what we have called Syrian and Pre-Syrian; and further, less distinctly, subdivided the latter into two subordinate 'nations' or 'families', represented typically by A and by the Old Latin. At the same time he laid great stress on internal evidence, in this as in other respects making large use of