hin the last hundred years,
any person of sixty-five could bear testimony to the fact that, when he
first began to be instructed in the nature of the Church Services he was
told by his elders that up to a time which they could perfectly
recollect certain selections from Scripture had been read in Church, but
that at such a period during their lifetime a change had been brought
about after certain public debates, and that it received such or such
opposition and was not at once universally adopted, which change was the
reading in public of the present selection. It is clear then, that if
all public documents were destroyed, yet any two men, who could scarcely
be called old men, would be able to transmit with perfect certainty the
record of any change in the public reading of Scripture during the last
one hundred years.

But, supposing that instead of a change in the mere selections from the
Gospels, the very Gospels themselves had been changed, could such a
thing have occurred unnoticed, and the memory of it be so absolutely
forgotten that neither history nor tradition preserved the smallest hint
of it at the end of a short century?

Now this, and far more than this, is what the author of "Supernatural
Religion" asks his readers to believe throughout his whole work.

We have seen how, before the end of this century, no other authoritative
memoirs of Christ were known by the Church, and these were known and
recognized as so essential a part of the Christian system, that their
very number as four, and only four, was supposed to be prefigured from
the very beginning of the world.

Now Justin lived till the year 165 in this century. He was martyred when
Irenaeus must have been twenty-five years old. Both Clement and
Tertullian must have been born before his martyrdom, perhaps several
years, and yet the author of "Supernatural Religion" would have us
believe that the books of Christians which were accounted most sacred in
the year 190, and used in that year as frequently, and with as firm a
belief in their authenticity as they are by any Christians now, were
unused by Justin Martyr, and that one of the four was absolutely unknown
to him--in all probability forged after his time.

We are persistently told all this, too, in spite of the fact that he
reproduces the account of the Birth, Teaching, Death, and Resurrection
of Christ exactly as they are contained in the Four, without a single
additional circumstance worth speaki