But we must not forget that there is a double challenge to be met.  The first part of it—­that which relates to the evidence for the existence of the Gospels—­has been answered.  It remains to consider how far the external evidence for the Gospels goes to prove their authenticity.  It may indeed well be asked how the external evidence can be expected to prove the authenticity of these records.  It does so, to a considerable extent, indirectly by throwing them back into closer contact with the facts.  It also tends to establish the authority in which they were held, certainly in the last quarter of the second century, and very probably before.  By this time the Gospels were acknowledged to be all that is now understood by the word ‘canonical.’  They were placed upon the same footing as the Old Testament Scriptures.  They were looked up to with the same reverence and regarded as possessing the same Divine inspiration.  We may trace indeed some of the steps by which this position was attained.  The [Greek:  gegraptai] of the Epistle of Barnabas, the public reading of the Gospels in the churches mentioned by Justin, the [Greek:  to eiraemenon] of Tatian, the [Greek:  guriakai graphai] of Dionysius of Corinth, all prepare the way for the final culmination in the Muratorian Canon and Irenaeus.  So complete had the process been that Irenaeus does not seem to know of a time when the authority of the Gospels had been less than it was to him.  Yet the process had been, of course, gradual.  The canonical Gospels had to compete with several others before they became canonical.  They had to make good their own claims and to displace rival documents; and they succeeded.  It is a striking instance of the ’survival of the fittest.’  That they were really the fittest is confirmed by nearly every fragment of the lost Gospels that remains, but it would be almost sufficiently proved by the very fact that they survived.

In this indirect manner I think that the external evidence bears out the position assigned to the canonical Gospels.  It has preserved to us the judgment of the men of that time, and there is a certain relative sense in which the maxim, ’Securus judicat orbis terrarum,’ is true.  The decisions of an age, especially decisions such as this where quite as much depended upon pious feeling as upon logical reasoning, are usually sounder than the arguments that are put forward to defend them.  We should hardly endorse the arguments by which Irenaeus proves a priori the necessity of a ‘four-fold Gospel,’ but there is real weight in the fact that four Gospels and no more were accepted by him and others like him.  It is difficult to read without impatience the rough words that are applied to the early Christian writers and to contrast the self-complacency in which our own superior knowledge is surveyed.  If there is something in which they are behind us, there is much also in which we are behind them.  Among the many things for which Mr. Arnold deserves our gratitude he deserves it not least for the way in which he has singled out two sentences, one from St. Augustine and the other from the Imitation, ’Domine fecisti nos ad te et irrequietum est cor nostrum donec requiescat in te,’ and, ‘Esto humilis et pacificus et erit tecum, Jesus.’  The men who could write thus are not to be despised.