ch a kind as must necessarily have
involved questions intimately connected with the Canon. Montanism, with
its doctrine of the Paraclete and its visions of the New Jerusalem,
would challenge some expression of opinion respecting the Gospel and the
Apocalypse of St John, if these writings were disputed. The Paschal
controversy courted investigation into the relations between the
narratives of the Synoptists and the Fourth Evangelist. Marcionism,
resting as it did on the paramount and sole authority of St Paul's
Epistles and of the Pauline Gospel, would not suffer friend or foe to
preserve silence on this fundamental question. And so again, though in a
less degree, the disputes with Cerinthians, with Ophites, with
Basilideans, with Valentinians, with all the various sects of Gnostics,
could not have been conducted, as we see plainly from the treatises of
Irenaeus and Hippolytus, without constant appeals to the testimony of
written documents--thus indicating, at all events roughly, the amount of
authority which the writers accorded to the more prominent books of our
New Testament Canon. To men like Irenaeus or Eusebius, who had this
extensive literature in their hands, the teaching of this Church
generally, as well as of the more prominent individual writers belonging
to it, could not have been open to question. Their approval of its
orthodoxy therefore, either by silent assent or by studied panegyric, is
a fact of real moment.

Over and above this relation to the books of the New Testament
generally, the two points to which modern controversy directs attention,
and which therefore deserve special consideration in any review of the
writers belonging to the school of St John, are--_first_, what
indications the extant fragments and notices contain, that they
recognized or rejected the Fourth Gospel; and _secondly_, what can be
learnt from these same sources as to the degree of authority which they
accorded to the Apostle of the Gentiles.

Polycarp and Papias have been discussed in my earlier articles [220:1].
In the case of both these fathers, a recognition of the Fourth Gospel
has been inferred from the use made of the First Epistle; in the case of
the latter, from other indications also. As regards St Paul the
testimony of Polycarp is as full and explicit as it well could be;
while, on the other hand, the meagre fragments of Papias do not in
themselves warrant any inference on this point.

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