insists, however, that no matter who wrote it, or when, the book is
authentic and the story true; and as one of the principal proofs of
this fact, he quotes Matt, xii, 39, 40.

Thus I finished the Old Testament, considerably shaken in faith; but as
the Old Testament belonged to a long past dispensation, I considered it
of little value anyway, and approached the study of the New with the
hope that all difficulties would be removed and all doubts made clear.
If the New Testament was truly inspired of God and infallibly true,
what difference did it make if the Old was doubtful and uncertain? It
was "out of date" anyway.

CHAPTER IV

NEARER THE CRISIS

Our author begins his "Introduction to the Study of the New Testament"
with an account of the language and characters in which most of it was
originally written, as he did the Old. These were Greek Uncials, all
capital letters, without any space divisions between the words, and
neither accent nor punctuation marks; that from these original
manuscripts, down to the invention of printing, all copies were made by
hand copying. The oldest existing manuscripts were made in the fourth
and fifth centuries of the Christian era, and no two of these are
exactly alike. During the succeeding centuries several thousand
manuscript copies of all or parts of the New Testament were made that
are still extant, _and no two exactly alike_!

I also learned that there are still extant quite a number of ancient
Versions of the New Testament, translated into different languages, all
of which are more or less different from each other, not alone in the
text, _but in the books recognized as authentic and canonical_.

Here the author gives a brief history of the formation of the New
Testament Canon, which so surprised, and even startled me, that I must
make some mention of it. (In his treatment of the Old Testament the
author gives but a few pages to the formation of the Old Testament
Canon.) In the fifth Article of Religion in the Methodist Discipline
it says: "In the name of the Holy Scriptures we do understand those
canonical books of the Old and New Testaments of whose authority _was
never any doubt in the Church_." (Italics mine.) But here I was to
learn that for over three hundred years there was more or less
controversy, and sometimes very bitter, over what books of the New
Testament were, or were not, authentic and authoritative; that as a
matter of fact there never was c