earth shall pass away, yet one jot, or one tittle, shall not pass from the law.”  But these, I know not how, promising to deliver my opinion, (see Galatians as above) take upon them to explain the words they heard from me, better than I that spoke them; telling their disciples, my sense was that of which I had not so much as thought.  Now, if in my own life time, they dare feign such things, how much more will those that come after, do the same.”

APPENDIX C.

Extract from Dodwell’s Dissertations on Irenaeus, Diss. 1, p.p. 38, 39.

“The Canonical writings (i. e. of the New Testament), lay concealed in the coffers of private churches, or persons, till the latter times of Trajan, or rather perhaps of Adrian; so that they could not come to the knowledge of the church.  For if they had been published, they would have been overwhelmed under such a multitude as were then of apocryphal and suppositious books, that a new examination and a new testimony would be necessary to distinguish them from these false ones.  And it is from this new testimony (whereby the genuine writings of the apostles were distinguished from the spurious pieces which went under their names,) that depends all the authority which the truly apostolic writings have formerly obtained, or which they have at present in the Catholic Church.  But this fresh attestation of the canon is subject to the same inconveniences with those traditions of the ancient persons that I defend, and whom Irenaeus both heard and saw; for it is equally distant from the original, and could not be made except by such only as had reached those remote times.  But it is very certain that before the period I mentioned of Trajan’s time, the canon of the sacred books, was not yet fixed, nor any certain number of books received in the Catholic Church, whose authority must ever after serve to determine matters of faith; neither were the spurious pieces of heretics yet rejected, nor were the faithful admonished to beware of them for the future.  Likewise, the true writings of the apostles used to be so bound up in one volume with the apocryphal, that it was not manifest by any mark of public censure which of them should be preferred to the other.  We have at this day, certain authentic writings of ecclesiastical authors of those times, as Clemens Romanus, Barnabas, Hermas, Ignatius, and Polycarp, who wrote in the same order wherein I have named them, and after all the other writers of the New Testament, except Jude, and the two Johns.  But in Hermas you shall not meet with one passage, or any mention of the New Testament; nor in all the rest is any one of the evangelists called by his own name.  And if sometimes they cite any passages like those we read in our gospels; yet, you will find them so much changed, and for the most part so interpolated, that it cannot be known, whether they produced them out of ours, or some apocryphal gospels; nay, they