. When, then, a Collection presents
itself professing to consist of the Ante-Nicene Canons, there is nothing
at all to startle us; it only professes to set before us that which we
know anyhow must have existed. We may conjecture, if we please, that the
fact that there were Canons may have suggested and encouraged a
counterfeit. Certainly; but though the fact that there were Canons will
account for a counterfeit, it will not account for those original Canons
being lost; on the contrary, what is known to have once existed as a
rule of conduct, is likely to continue in existence, except under
particular circumstances. Which of the two this existing Collection is,
the genuine or the counterfeit, must depend on other considerations; but
if these considerations be in favour of its genuineness, then this
antecedent probability will be an important confirmation.

Canons, I say, must have existed, whether these be the real ones or no;
and the circumstance that there were real ones existing must have tended
to make it difficult to substitute others. It would be no easy thing in
our own Church to pass off another set of Articles for the Thirty-nine,
and to obliterate the genuine. Canons are public property, and have to
be acted upon by large bodies. Accordingly, as might be expected, the
Nicene Council, when enacting Canons of its own, refers to certain
Canons as already existing, and speaks of them in that familiar and
indirect way which would be natural under the circumstances, just as we
speak of our Rubrics or Articles. The Fathers of that Council mention
certain descriptions of persons whom "_the Canon_ admits into holy
orders;" they determine that a certain rule shall be in force,
"according to the Canon which says so and so;" they speak of a
transgression of the Canon, and proceed to explain and enforce it. Nor
is the Nicene the only Council which recognizes the existence of certain
Canons, or rules, by which the Church was at that time bound. The
Councils of Antioch, Gangra, Constantinople, and Carthage, in the same
century, do so likewise; so do individual Fathers, Alexander,
Athanasius, Basil, Julius, and others.

Now here we have lighted upon an important circumstance, whatever
becomes of the particular Collection of Canons before us. It seems that
at the Nicene Council, only two centuries and a quarter after St. John's
death, about the distance of time at which we live from the Hampton
Court Conference, all Christendo