proclaim their early date. There is no sign whatever in them of a Canon
or authoritative collection of Books of the New Testament.' There are
frequent references to the facts of Christ's life, death, and
resurrection, and Gospel sayings are given; but there is 'not a single
reference to written evangelical records, such as the "Memoirs of the
Apostles," which occupy so large a place in Justin Martyr.' The same
holds good of the Apostolic Epistles.

'I would ask,' the Bishop concludes, 'any reader who desires
to apprehend the full force of these (facts with reference
to Ignatius) to read a book or two of Irenaeus continually,
and mark the contrast in the manner of dealing with the
Evangelical narratives and the Apostolic letters. He will
probably allow that an interval of two generations or more
is not too long a period to account for the difference of
treatment.'

The personality of the writer is no doubt unusual. A power of
communication with angels,[75] 'extravagant' humility and
self-depreciation;[76] and a not less 'extravagant' desire for martyrdom
(confined, however, to the Epistle to the Romans), are not certainly
what a later age commended or found in the Martyrs; but due allowance
being made for the temperament of the Saint and the circumstances of the
case, 'it is a picture much more explicable as the autotype of a real
person than as the invention of a forger.'

Once more, the Style and Diction of the Letters may be, as Daille and
his followers have thought, 'forced and unnatural' in the use of images,
'confused' as to language, and 'bombastic' as to diction. But what then?
asks the Bishop:--

'What security did his position as an Apostolic Father give
that he should write simply and plainly, that he should
avoid solecisms, that his language should never he
disfigured by bad taste or faulty rhetoric?'

'It may not,' he continues, 'be considered very good taste
to draw out the metaphor of a hauling engine (Ephes. 9)--to
compare the Holy Spirit to the rope, the faith of the
believers to the windlass, &c. But on what grounds, prior to
experience, have we any more right to expect either a
faultless taste or a pure diction in a genuine writer at the
beginning of the second century, than in a spurious writer
at the end of the same?'

Elaborate compounds, Latinisms, reiterations, are no proof of
spuriousness.