ture, though he makes no
parade of it. He argues against his opponents with much patience. His
work is systematic, and occasionally shows great acuteness. His
traditions, no doubt, require sifting, like other men's, and sometimes
dissolve in the light of criticism. He has his weak points also, whether
in his interpretations or in his views of things. But what then? Who
refuses to listen to the heathen rhetorician Aristides or the apostate
Emperor Julian on matters of fact because they are both highly
superstitious--the one paying a childish deference to dreams, the other
showing himself a profound believer in magic? In short, Irenaeus betrays
no incapacity which affects his competency as a witness to a broad and
comprehensive fact, such as that with which alone we are concerned.

And his testimony is confirmed by evidence from all sides. The
recognition of these four Gospels from a very early date is the one fact
which explains the fragmentary notices and references occurring in
previous writers. Moreover his contemporaries in every quarter of the
Church repeat the same story independently. The Old Latin Version,
already existing when Irenaeus published his work and representing the
Canon of the African Christians, included these four Gospels, and these
only. The author of the Muratorian fragment, writing a few years before
him, and apparently representing the Church of Rome, recognizes these,
and these alone. Clement, writing a few years later, as a member of the
Alexandrian Church, who had also travelled far and wide, and sat at the
feet of divers teachers, in Greece, in Asia Minor, in Palestine, in
Italy, doubts the authenticity of a story told in an apocryphal writing,
on the ground that it was not related in any of the four Gospels handed
down by the Church [270:1]. What is the meaning of all this coincidence
of view? It must be borne in mind that the Canon of the New Testament
was not made the subject of any conciliar decree till the latter half of
the fourth century. When therefore we find this agreement on all sides
in the closing years of the second, without any formal enactment, we can
only explain it as the convergence of independent testimony showing
that, though individual writers might allow themselves the use of other
documents, yet the general sense of the Church had for some time past
singled out these four Gospels by tacit consent, and placed them in a
position of exceptional authority.

One other rem