circumstance, which had to pass through only two intermediate hands, may be supposed to have reached him unaltered. We can scarcely imagine a more direct channel of communication than that which must have conveyed to him the broad and obvious events of our Saviour's life. And yet we know that he has asserted (for no better reason, so far as we can understand, than for that of supporting a fanciful theory respecting the several divisions of human life, and of illustrating very unnecessarily a text in Scripture, John viii. 57), that our Lord must have reached nearly the fiftieth year of his age at the time of his crucifixion 1; in order to make out which circumstance, he gratuitously inserts, contrary to the express declaration of the four evangelists, a period of upwards of fifteen years between his baptism and the commencement of his ministry. Why, we may surely ask, should other more intricate and less palpable truths be supposed to descend to us un

1 Adversus Hares. lib. ii. c. 39.

changed, through a course of eighteen centuries, by mere oral transmission, if a person possessed of such means of arriving at the truth, flourishing within one hundred and fifty years of our Lord's crucifixion, could make so strange a mistake with regard to a simple event of mere history?

It being absolutely necessary, if we would attach any real authority to tradition, that we should prove its connection with the apostolical age, it seems scarcely to be required that I should follow up this line of argument farther, if it has been already shown that between the close of the apostolic period and the death of Irenæus, not only no recorded sanction can be found in favour of authoritative tradition, but that, on the contrary, from the obvious inaccuracies of the few writers of that time, a strong presumption is established against it. Still, however, it may be worth while to look onward a little further, if it is only to show that the subsequent course of time was quite in harmony with the preceding, and that the accumulation of human

inventions in religion was a gradual process which did not at once attain to full maturity.

The period then which immediately followed the age of Irenæus was one in which those canons of sound criticism, the observance of which is so absolutely necessary for testing the accuracy of recorded facts, or the authenticity of written records, were little, if at all studied. Spurious productions, bearing the names of primitive or of apostolical writers, began now to make their appearance, and for want of that quick-sightedness in works of literature, which none but a learned and studious people can ever possess, succeeded to an almost incredible extent in imposing upon the ready belief of the readers of that period. We cannot have a stronger illustration of this circumstance than the testimony which was given by such distinguished men as Clemens Alexandrinus and Origen to the authenticity of that singularly wild composition, the apocryphal epistle of Barnabas; a work which, from the strange interpolations and misrepresentations of the Levitical law, and the many

1

gross blunders which it contains, would appear at once to carry with it its own refutation. But for these the reader is referred to the elaborate dissertation upon this and the other spurious works of antiquity, by the Rev. Jeremiah Jones. It may, however, be here worth observing, that amongst other mistakes into which the unknown author of this work has fallen, he has committed one which by a singular coincidence a century later was repeated by the celebrated Lactantius; a blunder so gross, that the mere fact of its transmission to our times seems to mark the age which did not at once reject it, as strangely deficient even in the most commonly required knowledge of the Holy Scriptures. I allude to the celebrated prophecy respecting Cyrus, which occurs in Isaiah xlv. 1. It seems scarcely credible that both the writers above mentioned, quoting the Old Testament from the Greek of the Septuagint instead of the original Hebrew, should

1 Such, for instance, as the supposition, evidently implied, that the patriarch Abraham must have spoken Greek.

have been so ignorant of that most remarkable scripture fact, as to have read the word Κύριος instead of Κῦρος; and thus, mistaking the real meaning of the passage, have applied the passage in question solely to the person of Christ. Τῷ Χριστῷ μου Κυpiq, are the words of the former : "Sic dicit Dominus Deus Christo Domino meo1," are the words of the latter. What would be thought of the biblical knowledge of any writer of the present day who could commit such a mistake as the above? and what then must we think of the weight of authority attached to the oral traditions of an age which could transmit such an one unnoticed and uncensured? I am aware, indeed, with respect

1 Lactantii de Vera Sapientia, lib. iv. cap. 12.

2 Another and a singular instance of the implicit credulity with which some of the early Christian writers adopted the statements of their predecessors, often in defiance of the most accessible historical evidence to the contrary, and with a total absence of critical discrimination, occurs in the reference made by Eusebius, in the 13th chapter of the 2nd book of his Ecclesiastical History to the narrative of Justin Martyr, respecting the asserted deification of Simon Magus