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ART. II.-La Civilization au cinquième Siècle par A. FREDERIC OzaNAM, Professeur de la Litterature Etrangère, a la Faculté de Lettres de Paris.

2. Histoire Universelle de l'Église chretienne. Par M. MATTER : Strasbourg, 1835.

3. Histoire de la Chute du Paganism dans l'Occident. Par M. LE COMTE BEUGNOT: Paris.

4. Sacred Latin Poetry, chiefly Lyrical, selected and arranged for use; with Notes and Introduction: by RICHARD CHENEVIX TRENCH, D. D., Archbishop of London. London: 1864.

5. Where were our Gospels written! An Argument by CONSTANTINE TISCHENDERF; With a narrative of the discovery of the Sinaitic Manuscript.

ONE of the most remarkable signs of the present time is the prominent place which the discussion of Christian antiquities holds in the current literature of the day. There seems to be a revival of that spirit which was so active in the third, fourth, and fifth centuries of the Church, and which gave to the world such men as Origen, Eusebius, and Jerome. There is as great a diversity of sects now, as then; and as great contention as to the origin, history, and interpretation of the sacred records as prevailed between the Gnostics, the Marcionites, the Arians, and other heretics on the one side, and the orthodox Christians on the other.

The authenticity of the books of the Bible was constantly disputed by some and upheld by others. One sect, for instance, would reject the Apocalypse altogether, while another would accept it as a book for use in the church, but deny that it was written by the apostle John. Each of the canonical gospels had its adversaries and its defenders; while a number of apocryphial gospels were at the same time put forward as of equal authencity with, or supplementary to, them. There were unbelieving philosophers, and philosophizing Christians in those days, who refined

away all that savours of the supernatural or of divine interference, just as the disciples of the modern rationalist school of Germany do in these.

But there has been a long interval between the former and the latter. After the subsidence of the great Arian controversy, and the Donatist schism in the fourth and fifth centuries, orthodoxy assumed the lead, and so firmly established its claims to the homage of mankind that for many centuries all efforts to shake its authority proved futile, and brought destruction on those who made them. For a thousand years the Church ruled over the western world with irresistible strength, and it was not until the sixteenth century that blows were struck at the supremacy which shook it to the foundation. From the days of Luther and Calvin down to the present time there has been a continual widening of the breach between the mother church and her "protesting" children; and the latter have split up into a variety of sects which it would not be an easy task to enumerate or describe.

Fortunately for us, we are not now called upon to undertake such a labour; our present object being simply to draw attention to the tendency which religious thought has developed in our time, and to point out the abounding interest which the subject of Christian antiquities possesses, not merely for the divine and the scholar, but for all who will take the trouble to read and think for themselves.

Within the last forty years there has been produced a much greater amount of literature relating to the origin of Christianity and the history of its early records, than has appeared for many centuries previously. In all ages attacks have been made upon the authority of both, and in recent times Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Voltaire, Priestley, and their followers, have been no mean adversaries; but in their day the world that is, the Christian world-was rather scandalized than alarmed by the efforts made by these men to prove the absurdity and the improbability of the miracles on which Christianity rests. Their writings had but a very limited effect on the religious community at large, though they leavened the minds of thousands who had been predis

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posed by political ambition and domestic tyranny, as in France and Germany, to rebel against all authority, civil or ecclesiastical. With persons of this description it was an easy step from throwing off their allegiance to the church to throwing off their allegiance to its founder. Our grandfathers, who remained faithful to the principles instilled into them in childhood, were content with such answers to the infidels as were put forth from time to time by the learned doctors of the Church.

The adversaries of the faith in modern times, however, have resorted to the sap and mine, rather than to the bat-tering ram of old, or the heavy artillery of to-day. They pull to pieces in detail; they do not so much deny facts, as question the evidence on which the facts are to be believed. This system provides endless employment both for assailant. and assailed; and it has been perseveringly used by the modern German theologians, critics, and scholars. The Bible has been thoroughly" overhauled" and dissected, root and branch; its smallest fibres have been subjected to analysis, and the result has been the accumulation of an amount of learning and knowledge respecting the history and antiquities of the East, and of the Jews and the early Christians, which renders the works of Taylor, Warburton, and other divines of the last century, obsolete.

Add to these critical and scholarly investigations thenumerous works of travellers and explorers, whose labours have, within the present century, shed so much light upon the topography of the countries wherein occurred the incidents recorded in Scripture, and which have strikingly developed the fulfilment of prophecy, and the truthfulness. of the Bible pictures of oriental life; and it is evident that. we of the present day possess materials for forming opinions on vexed points, and for testing new theories, as well as old ones, which give us an enormous advantage over the last generation. In this respect the works of Strauss Weisse,. Gfrörer, Bauer, Renan, Schenkel, and others have been of use; they have necessitated, on the part of those who are. now called upon to stand forth as champions of the Christian Church, the cultivation of a very much deeper know-

ledge of Hebrew, Greek, and their cognate languages, and of the early Christian history and literature, as well as of the history and antiquities of the old world, than formerly sufficed for the most eminent scholars. A recent writer says "The Christian world is more indebted to Germany and her skeptical writers for light respecting the scriptures, than to all the orthodox commentators from the age of the fathers to their time; for their attacks and their assiduity in their efforts to overthrow scripture have led to the formation of nearly all the intelligent biblical literature that we have; for when they did not themselves furnish that light, they opened the avenues and stirred up a new field of Christian inquiry, showing that God uses whom He will." And Dr. Stowe, in his work on "The Origin and History of the Books of the Bible" (p. 252) justly remarks that "the German unbelief cannot now be successfully encountered without the help of German learning. The antidote is scarcely to be found except where the poison grows. The climes which yield the most noxious plants are the very climes which produce the most effective medicines, the sweetest fruit, the most luxurious vegetation.'

Few persons, besides those whose profession naturally leads them to the subject, are aware of the extent and variety of the early Christian literature. Under this head we include not only those evangelical and apostolical writings which form the canon of the New Testament and are now universally received as the foundation of all Christian doctrine; but those apocryphal compositions which were written, or were said to have been written, by the apostles, or by their associates or disciples, and which passed under the names of gospels, epistles, acts, revelations, visions, traditions, hymns, doctrine, preaching, judgment, &c.; and also the histories and commentaries of the Christian ecclesiastics of the first four centuries. Many of these productions have been entirely lost. Some have come down to us entire, others in a mutilated or fragmentary form; while of others, again, there remain only such extracts as are found in the writings of Origen, Eusebius, Jerome, and others, who quoted from them while they discussed their merits.

Many of our readers will be surprised to learn that at one time, in the second century, there were no fewer than thirty-eight gospels in existence, some of which actually claimed to be the originals of, and equal in authority to, the four canonical gospels. There were fourteen books passing under the title of Acts, exclusive of the authentic Acts of the Apostles. It has been said that there were two hundred epistles attributed to the apostle Paul which were then in circulation. We have a list of thirty-one epistles by various authors, besides the twenty-one which form part of the New Testament. There were six books styled "Revelations," besides the apocalypse of St. John, and there were twelve "books," properly so called, attributed for the most part to the apostles. Besides all these there were miscellaneous writings which do not fall exactly under any of these heads; such were the Apostles' Creed, the Hymn which Jesus taught to his disciples, and those books which were known under the names of the "the Traditions of Matthew," "the doctrine of Peter," "the preaching of Peter," "the judgment of Peter," "the preaching of Paul," and the like.

Here we have one hundred and thirty-five books and writings of various kinds, of which twenty-seven were the genuine productions of inspired writers, the remaining one hundred and eight being apocryphal, that is to say, of doubtful authenticity. Of the hundred and thirty-five, there are extant thirty-six, and the remaining sixty-nine have been lost. The titles of some of these lost books would be sufficient to stifle any regret we might feel at their disappearance; such, for instance, as "the Arabic gospel of Joseph, the carpenter," "the Gospel of Truth," "the Gospel of Encratites," "the epistle of Christ to Peter and Paul," "the general epistle of Christ," (produced by the Manichees)," the Epistle of Themison, the Montanist," "the Book of the Helkasaites," "the Book of Lentitius," " "the Revelation of Cerinthus" (the heretic), &c.

The apocryphal religious literature of the early centuries of the Christian era was, indeed, abundant enough to satisfy the cravings of an ordinary appetite; for to the works

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