ity" is, in
fact, an appeal to science, first to define what antiquity is; secondly,
to determine what "antiquity," so defined, says about canonicity;
thirdly, to prove that canonicity means infallibility. And when science,
largely in the shape of the abhorred "criticism," has answered this
appeal, and has shown that "antiquity" used her own methods, however
clumsily and imperfectly, she naturally turns round upon the appellants,
and demands that they should show cause why, in these days, science
should not resume the work the ancients did so imperfectly, and carry it
out efficiently.

But no such cause can be shown. If "antiquity" permitted Eusebius,
Origen, Tertullian, Irenaeus, to argue for the reception of this book
into the canon and the rejection of that, upon rational grounds,
"antiquity" admitted the whole principal of modern criticism. If Irenaeus
produces ridiculous reasons for limiting the Gospels to four, it was
open to any one else to produce good reasons (if he had them) for
cutting them down to three, or increasing them to five. If the Eastern
branch of the Church had a right to reject the Apocalypse and accept the
Epistle to the Hebrews, and the Western an equal right to accept the
Apocalypse and reject the Epistle, down to the fourth century, any other
branch would have an equal right, on cause shown, to reject both, or as
the Catholic Church afterwards actually did, to accept both.

Thus I cannot but think that the thirty-eight are hoist with their own
petard. Their "appeal to antiquity" turns out to be nothing but a
round-about way of appealing to the tribunal the jurisdiction of which
they affect to deny. Having rested the world of Christian
supernaturalism on the elephant of biblical infallibility, and furnished
the elephant with standing ground on the tortoise of "antiquity," they,
like their famous Hindoo analogue, have been content to look no further;
and have thereby been spared the horror of discovering that the tortoise
rests on a grievously fragile construction, to a great extent the work
of that very intellectual operation which they anathematise and
repudiate.

Moreover, there is another point to be considered. It is of course true
that a Christian Church (whether the Christian Church, or not, depends
on the connotation of the definite article) existed before the Christian
scriptures; and that infallibility of these depends upon infallibility
of the judgment of the persons who selected t