Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: of Alexandria made use of the same term to designate model authors, making rules in literature; so that the ecclesiastical writers early employed it to mean sometimes Christian doctrine, the rule of our life; sometimes, the divine book, the only rule of our faith; sometimes, in fine, the catalogue of the sacred books composing this rule. This became at length its almost exclusive religious meaning.1 SECTION II. THE NOTION OF A CANON OF THE NEW TESTAMENT TRACED TO THE DAYS OF THE APOSTLES. Before even consulting the ecclesiastical historians on this subject, we may already comprehend, from the nature of things, that the idea of a divine collection of the writings of the New Testament, must have early sprung up in all the communities of those who believed in Christ. Is it not evident that it must have originated as soon as these churches saw the men,
apostles and prophets, who announced to them the gospel with the Holy Spirit sent down from heaven,8 beginning to write to them apostolical letters, or transmit to them the history of the Saviour’s life and teachings? In fact. they were entirely prepared for it by having in their hands the Old Testament. This collection, already 1 It should, however, be remarked, to avoid all mistake in examining the writmgs of the Fathers, that while they had a distinct ‘and definite catalogue of books, which they regarded as inspired, and as distinguished from the apocrvphal or uninspired, but which were allowed to be read in churches, yet they did not at first agree in their use of the term canon. From a varied application of it to lists of clergymen, and even of church furniture, it came in the fourth century to be applied, as now, to the catalogue of Scriptures. But then it will be found that some time elapsed before Jerome’s us…