During the last five years we have had a change in our Lectionary, which change only affects the rearrangement of the portions read each day out of the same Gospels, and every boy and girl of fifteen years old at the time would recognize the alteration when it took place.  If it had occurred fifty years ago, any man or woman of sixty-five would perfectly remember the change.  If it had occurred within the last hundred years, any person of sixty-five could bear testimony to the fact that, when he first began to be instructed in the nature of the Church Services he was told by his elders that up to a time which they could perfectly recollect certain selections from Scripture had been read in Church, but that at such a period during their lifetime a change had been brought about after certain public debates, and that it received such or such opposition and was not at once universally adopted, which change was the reading in public of the present selection.  It is clear then, that if all public documents were destroyed, yet any two men, who could scarcely be called old men, would be able to transmit with perfect certainty the record of any change in the public reading of Scripture during the last one hundred years.

But, supposing that instead of a change in the mere selections from the Gospels, the very Gospels themselves had been changed, could such a thing have occurred unnoticed, and the memory of it be so absolutely forgotten that neither history nor tradition preserved the smallest hint of it at the end of a short century?

Now this, and far more than this, is what the author of “Supernatural Religion” asks his readers to believe throughout his whole work.

We have seen how, before the end of this century, no other authoritative memoirs of Christ were known by the Church, and these were known and recognized as so essential a part of the Christian system, that their very number as four, and only four, was supposed to be prefigured from the very beginning of the world.

Now Justin lived till the year 165 in this century.  He was martyred when Irenaeus must have been twenty-five years old.  Both Clement and Tertullian must have been born before his martyrdom, perhaps several years, and yet the author of “Supernatural Religion” would have us believe that the books of Christians which were accounted most sacred in the year 190, and used in that year as frequently, and with as firm a belief in their authenticity as they are by any Christians now, were unused by Justin Martyr, and that one of the four was absolutely unknown to him—­in all probability forged after his time.

We are persistently told all this, too, in spite of the fact that he reproduces the account of the Birth, Teaching, Death, and Resurrection of Christ exactly as they are contained in the Four, without a single additional circumstance worth speaking of, making only such alterations as would be natural in the reproduction of such an account for those who were without the pale of the Church.