the
Cherubim, the Captain of the Angels, God who is of God, the Son who
is of the Father, Jesus Christ, the King for ever and ever. Amen.

This fragment is not in any way exceptional. The references to
evangelical history, the modes of expression, the statements of
doctrine, all have close parallels scattered through the other fragments
ascribed to Melito. Indeed it is the remarkable resemblance of these
fragments to each other in thought and diction (with one or two
exceptions), though gathered together from writers of various ages, in
Greek and in Syriac, which is a strong argument for their genuineness.
But the special value of this particular passage is that it gathers into
a focus the facts of the evangelical history, on which the faith of
Melito rested.

And I do not think it can be reasonably doubted whence these facts are
derived. The author of _Supernatural Religion_ of course suggests some
unknown apocryphal Gospel. But this summary will strike most readers as
wonderfully like what a writer might be expected to make who recognized
our four canonical Gospels as the sources of evangelical truth. And,
when they remember that within a very few years (some twenty at most)
Irenaeus, who was then a man past middle life, who had intimate
relations with the region in which Melito lived, and who appeals again
and again to the Asiatic Elders as his chief authorities for the
traditional doctrine and practice, declares in perfect good faith that
the Church had received these four, and these only, from the beginning,
it will probably seem to them irrational to look elsewhere, when the
solution is so very obvious.

But the author of _Supernatural Religion_ writes that this fragment
taken from a treatise _On Faith_, together with another which purports
to be a work on the _Soul and Body_, though these two works 'are
mentioned by Eusebius,' must nevertheless 'for every reason be
pronounced spurious' [233:1]. Let us see what these reasons are.

1. He writes first:

They have in fact no attestation whatever except that of the Syriac
translation, which is unknown, and which therefore is worthless.

The fact is that in a very vast number of literary remains, classical
and ecclesiastical, whether excerpts or entire works, we are entirely
dependent on the scribe for their authentication. Human experience has
shown that such authentication is generally trustworthy, and hence it is
accepted. In forty-nine c