THE STATE OF THE CANON IN THE LAST QUARTER OF THE SECOND CENTURY.

I should not be very much surprised if the general reader who may
have followed our enquiry so far should experience at this point a
certain feeling of disappointment. If he did not know beforehand
something of the subject-matter that was to be enquired into, he
might not unnaturally be led to expect round assertions, and
plain, pointblank, decisive evidence. Such evidence has not been
offered to him for the simple reason that it does not exist. In
its stead we have collected a great number of inferences of very
various degrees of cogency, from the possible and hypothetical, up
to strong and very strong probability. Most of our time has been
taken up in weighing and testing these details, and in the
endeavour to assign to each as nearly as possible its just value.
It could not be thought strange if some minds were impatient of
such minutiae; and where this objection was not felt, it would
still be very pardonable to complain that the evidence was at best
inferential and probable.

An inference in which there are two or three steps may be often
quite as strong as that in which there is only one, and
probabilities may mount up to a high degree of what is called
moral or practical certainty. I cannot but think that many of
those which have been already obtained are of this character. I
cannot but regard it as morally or practically certain that
Marcion used our third Gospel; as morally or practically certain
that all four Gospels were used in the Clementine Homilies; as
morally or practically certain that the existence of three at
least out of our four Gospels is implied in the writings of
Justin; as probable in a lower degree that the four were used by
Basilides; as not really disputable (apart from the presumption
afforded by earlier writers) that they were widely used in the
interval which separates the writings of Justin from those of
Irenaeus.

All of these seem to me to be tolerably clear propositions. But
outside these there seems to be a considerable amount of
convergent evidence, the separate items of which are less
convincing, but which yet derive a certain force from the mere
fact that they are convergent. In the Apostolic Fathers, for
example, there are instances of various kinds, some stronger and
some weaker; but the important point to notice is that they
confirm each other. Every new case adds to the total weight of the
evidence, and