literature of the Church we have
unmistakable testimonies to its existence as an apostolic Scripture.
Ignatius and Polycarp, quite early in the second century, shew us that
they have read it. A little later, in the "Epistle of the Churches of
Lyons and Vienne" (A.D. 177),[1] it is quoted. Clement of Alexandria,
and Irenaeus, and Tertullian, all in the second century, use it as "the
sword of the Spirit" to assert truth and confute error. So it floats
down into the broad stream of the patristic literature at large. Not
till the rise of an ultra-sceptical criticism in quite modern times was
Philippians ever seriously questioned as the work, in its integrity, of
St Paul. And Baur's objections, all due to an _a priori_ theory, not
to an impartial literary enquiry, have been repudiated even by critics
even less orthodox than himself: Renan, for example. It is quite as
certain, in a literary sense, that in Philippians we have the very
words and heart of St Paul as that we have Addison in the papers signed
C. in the _Spectator_, or Erasmus in the correspondence with Colet.

And what a thought of strength and joy this is to the believer of our
latter day! _Littera scripta manet_. How impressive is the permanence
of every written reflexion of the mind, and of the life! Who has not
felt it, even in the reading of a private letter to himself, written
years and years ago? We have St Paul speaking to us in this indelible
page as really as if we were seated with him in "his own hired house,"
and were _listening_ as he dictates to the friend beside him. And as
we recollect this, we reflect that all he is saying, all he has thus
left written, is just so much testimony to the Lord Jesus Christ,
contemporary, direct, inspired. When the words we are about to read
were written, scarcely thirty years had passed away since the Son of
Man died outside the gate of Jerusalem, and rose again. Perhaps my
reader cannot look back over thirty years, perhaps not over twenty,
with conscious memory. But I can; and beyond the thirty I can see a
long vista of the still earlier past. Thirty years ago[2];--at that
time the great conflict between Austria and Prussia was preparing, the
issue of which was so long a step towards the unification of Germany.
I was then a master in a public school. The discussions of the
impending war in our common-room, and the men who joined in them, are
very present still to my mind; certainly not the faintest ha