yet these events had never really taken place.  We must also suppose that the person upon whom these acts are attempted to be fastened was regarded with intense dislike by the great majority of his contemporaries, who did all they could to ruin him when alive, and blacken his memory after he had died, and who looked with especial dislike on the idea that he was supposed to have done the acts in question.  Let the reader, I say, try and imagine all this, and he will see that, in the case of our Lord, the author’s “long after” must be sixty or seventy years at the least; more likely a hundred.

Let us now summon another witness to the supernatural, whose testimony we promised to consider, and this shall be Clement of Rome—­the earliest author to whom it has suited the purpose of the author of “Supernatural Religion” to refer.

If we are to rely upon the almost universal consent of ancient authors rather than the mere conjectures of modern critics, he is the person alluded to by St. Paul in the words, “With Clement also, and with other my fellow labourers, whose names are written in the book of life.”  (Phil. iv. 3.)

Of this man Eusebius writes:—­

“In the twelfth year of the same reign (Domitian’s), after Anecletus had been bishop of Rome twelve years, he was succeeded by Clement, whom the Apostle, in his Epistle to the Philippians, shows had been his fellow-labourer in these words:  ’With Clement also and the rest of my fellow-labourers, whose names are in the book of life.’  Of this Clement there is one Epistle extant, acknowledged as genuine, of considerable length and of great merit, which he wrote in the name of the Church at Rome, to that of Corinth, at the time when there was a dissension in the latter.  This we know to have been publicly read for common benefit, in most of the Churches both in former times and in our own.” (Eccles.  Hist.  B. III. xv. xvi.)

Origen confirms this.  Clement of Alexandria reproduces several pages from his Epistle, calling him “The Apostle Clement,” [187:1] and Irenaeus speaks of him as the companion of the Apostles:—­

“This man, as he had seen the blessed Apostles and been conversant with them, might be said to have the preaching of the Apostles still echoing [in his ears], and their traditions before his eyes.” (Bk.  III. ch. iii. 3)

Irenaeus, it is to be remembered, died at the end of the second century, and his birth is placed within the first quarter of it, so that, in all probability, he had known numbers of Christians who had conversed with Clement.

According to the author of “Supernatural Religion,” the great mass of critics assign the Epistle of Clement to between the years A.D. 95-100.

In dealing with this Epistle I shall, for argument’s sake, assume that Clement quoted from an earlier Gospel than any one of our present ones, and that the one he quoted might be the Gospel according to the Hebrews, and I shall ask the same question that I asked respecting Justin Martyr—­What views of Christ’s Person and work and doctrine did he derive from this Gospel of his?