facts or sentiments now met with in most of our books; and among these the allusions to the three Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John, are more especially distinct and clear.

Our catalogue contains but two more names, Clement of Rome, and Barnabas, both falling within the first century; one of them the companion of an apostle, and the other himself an apostle. Of the epistle of Clement I have before spoken. It is on all hands admitted to be genuine, and was of such high esteem as to be publicly read in many churches, though not eventually allowed a place in the Canon; nor was there ever any doubt as to the identity of its author, and the Clement whom St. Paul mentions among his "fellow-labourers, whose names are in the book of life." (Phil. iv. 3.) It was, moreover drawn up in the name of the Church of Rome, and therefore must be taken as exhibiting the testimony, not so much of an individual, as of those in whose behalf it was sent. In examining these early writings, there is one circumstance to be remarked, which does not extend beyond the first few years of the existence of the Christian books. It is this: that Barnabas, Clement, Hermas, and their contemporaries, would necessarily be acquainted with much of the Christian story, independently of our books, from the many authentic traditions that must have then been current in the Church; nor could they have been otherwise than familiar with the sayings of St. Paul, the companion, or teacher of so many of them. It will therefore be material to select, if we can, sentences bearing the plainest internal marks of evident quotation; and many such will readily present themselves. The following, in particular, possesses such peculiarities that no one can hesitate a moment in concluding that the writer must have had before him the passage in the Epistle of the Romans set by its side:

Clement.

Casting off from us all unrighteousness and iniquity, covetousness, debates, malignities, deceits, whisperings, and backbitings, vain glory

Rom. i. 29, 30, 32.

Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder,debate, deceit, malig

and ambition. For they that do these things are hateful to God, and not only they that do them, but they also who have pleasure in them.

nity, whisperers, backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, without understanding, covenant breakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful; who, knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them.

An inspection of these passages makes it clear, that though Clement does not accurately quote St. Paul, but rather accommodates his words, and possibly from memory; yet it is impossible that two writers could have hit upon so singular a resemblance, not merely in the the juxtaposition of thoughts and words, but in their order, except one of them had the words of the other before him, or stored in his memory from frequent perusal. For the order is not likely to have been preserved so closely, even by the same speaker on different occasions, and cannot be accounted for by supposing that Clement remembered some stirring discourse of Paul. But beside this general reasoning, there is a still more satisfactory proof that this, and other similar passages, are really derived from our books. For the only book of the New Testament expressely named, and which therefore we are certain Clement had before him, is the first Epistle to the Corinthians; and the use made of this precisely accords with that made of the others; there is the same general coincidence, with the same omissions and additions of words and sentences, and variations of grammatical structure. An apt example will be supplied as in the following passage:

"The great cannot be without the little; nor the little without the great. There is a temperament in all things, and herein is a benefit. Let us for example take our body; the head without the feet is nothing, so neither the feet without the head. Even the smallest members of our body are necessary and useful to the whole body. And all conspire together, and are subject to one common use; the preservation of the whole."

The reader is requested to turn to the passage whence this is borrowed, (1 Cor. xii. 12.-27.) It is too long to

extract entire; and to omit the parts Clement has passed by, would defeat my purpose, which is to show the method of allusion, rather than quotation, running through the whole epistle. Dr. Lardner has collected, and printed, in parallel columns, upwards of forty such allusions, omitting others of minor importance; and of these, it may be worth observing, a considerable portion belong to the Epistle to the Hebrews, to which, indeed, that of Clement bears, throughout, a resemblance by no means inconsiderable.

ments occur.

The Epistle of Barnabas shall be dismissed in a few words. Its genuineness has been much disputed, and must be considered very questionable, though it bears the character of the age assigned to it, and certainly existed in the second century. Many also of the sentiments it contains in common with our books, might easily have come from one so prominently engaged in disseminating Christian truth, irrespectively of any writings in which similar sentiOne reference only to a saying found twice in St. Matthew's Gospel, and extant in no other book, shall suffice us: "Let us therefore beware lest it come upon us, as it is written, "There are many called few chosen." This is avowedly from some written book; and that too generally known, or it would have been more definitely marked; and esteemed divine; for the phrase here employed, "it is written," was exclusively restricted to books thus esteemed, as will appear from the constant usage of the authors of the New Testament, as well as of the early fathers,

I have given a few of the later Versions a place in the series just closed. Those antecedent to the time of Jerome cannot, with any degree of precision, be assigned to any particular age. I have therefore deemed it better to reserve them for subsequent remark; and perhaps the place they now occupy, at the commencement of my list in point of time, may not be very far from that they would by right fall into, were their history fully known. At the time the apostles wrote, Greek was, more than any other, the language of the world; vernacular in many countries, in others the language in which the government was carried on, it was the universal language of the learned; being in short, what Latin afterwards became in the West; what Sanscrit is to the native dialects of India; and what English is fast

becoming. Greek, therefore, was with great propriety selected as the language of the New Testament, though not vernacular to its authors; or all for whom its use was designed. The confusion of languages necessarily makes it impossible for any one language to render a matter of universal application, accessible to all; and that being chosen which was at the time most extensively cultivated, and most likely to meet with some in every country to whom it was known, it was left for these to bring it within the reach of the uneducated, by interpreting it in their native tongue. We should, therefore, expect that our books would soon be translated into the many provincial languages of the day; and accordingly, we have the testimony of Augustine, that the Latin church possessed many such versions, made at the first introduction of Christianity, by authors now unknown. That called the Old Italic gradually superceded the others, till supplanted in its turn by Jerome's, and existed at least before Tertullian, who uses it towards the close of the second century, to the early part of which it may probably belong. But the most important of these versions, for the purposes of evidence, is the Syriac. It is interesting as being the language spoken in Palestine at the time when Christ appeared, and consequently that in which his own discourses were actually delivered, and much of the teaching of the apostles was carried on. Those Churches indeed in which this version has been preserved regard it as the original of the gospels; even European critics have been divided in opinion as to the language in which St. Matthew wrote, and some have thought he may have written both in Hebrew and in Greek. But whether or no we may allow that one gospel was composed in the then language of Judæa, (a thing not in itself unlikely, if we were left to conjecture alone,) it is in the highest degree improbable, that a system of religion, to be "preached to every creature which is under heaven," (Col. i. 23.) should be promulgated in a language confined to a corner of the earth; and it is clear that St. Paul, who himself spoke Greek, (Acts xxi. 37.) would write to Greeks in a tongue they understood. But the universal testimony of antiquity is positive, except in the case of St. Matthew, in favour of Greek, and the Syriac Version itself bears undoubted marks that it is a version, and that too from the Greek text we now possess; for beside

it contains many Greek words, which might have been easily and correctly expressed in Syriac, and of which not fewer than eleven occur in a single chapter of St. Matthew, (ch. xxvii,) as well as the Latinisms that had been retained in the Greek; and beside this there are some singular mistakes which are at once accounted for by an inspection of the Greek original, and which could have arisen in no other way. But it is not likely that so important a section of the universal Church as were the Jewish Christians, would be long left without some effort to bring the New Testament within the reach of their uneducated members; and learned men are almost of one mind in assigning the Peschito, or Literal, Syriac Version to the close of the first, or beginning of the second century. It wants, as I have remarked before, the second Epistle of Peter, the second and third of John, the Epistle of Jude, and the Revelations; which have been added by later hands. But what gives peculiar value to this translation, is the fact that it was unknown in Europe till the year 1552. It had been preserved by the secluded churches in the deserts of Syria, and the mountains of Malabar, unknown to western nations, and the Scriptures of western nations had been preserved in Europe, unknown to them; and after the lapse of many centuries, the two were at length once more brought together, and on comparison found to differ in nothing of importance. Every name introduced, every fact stated, every doctrine propounded is the same.

OUR series closes with Barnabas; or, if the testimony of the Epistle which goes by his name be inconclusive, with Clement. Nor could it be more complete; for omitting every name which has been marked as doubtful, it has brought us to the very period, nay within the period, to which our books are assigned. For Clement wrote in the life time of St. John, and perhaps before that apostle had contributed his share to our collection, which was completed by his pen. During the last period which has passed under our review, I have been at some pains to point out the divine character uniformly ascribed to our books. I now beg the reader to remark that their divine origin is an essential feature of their story. Whether justly or not, they broadly assert it of themselves. With regard to Christ himself, I refer to John iii. 11; vii. 16; viii. 28; xii. 49; and xiv. 10. With reference to the apostles, I may put down John xiv. 26, and xvi. 12-15:-two passages most important to notice, for they declare, (1) that the

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