of faith, which becomes an integral part of Christian doctrine, not as a new truth, but as the settled interpretation of what was taught from the beginning.

If

The teaching of the Lord Jesus Christ being a complete revelation, the record of it also must be complete. anything originally unrecorded were afterwards recovered, this could only be by a fresh revelation. How then was it recorded? It was stored up exclusively in the memory of those who received it. There is perhaps in St. Luke's Gospel a trace of documents relating to our Lord's birth written at the time of the events, but there is no reason to suppose that any account of his life and teaching was committed to writing until after the lapse of many years. His doctrine had sunk into the minds of those whom he taught, and the power of the Holy Ghost was afterwards upon them to rouse and sustain their remembrance. What they had received by word of mouth they delivered in the same way. The teaching of the Master was thus communicated to the growing body of disciples by numerous interlacing lines of oral tradition. No surer means could be devised for preserving the record intact. Any variations of teaching, due to individual perversity or ignorance, were bound to come into collision with sounder and purer traditions. The Epistles of St. Paul abound with illustrations of this. We see there how jealously St. Paul himself was watched, and how ready he was in his turn to check the hesitations even of his fellow-apostles. By these means, in the course of some years, a solid tradition of doctrine was formed in the Christian society. Tradition is to a society what habit is to the individual. It cannot be set aside without a conscious effort. It is subject however, like habit, to subtle and imperceptible changes, and we should have no guarantee for the permanence of the Christian tradition, were it not

for the perpetual guidance of the Holy Spirit. This guidance was for the whole society. St. Paul couples the one Body and the one Spirit with the one Faith and the one Hope of our Christian calling. The social tradition was all-powerful to check individual variation, and was itself guarded by the operation of the Holy Spirit.'

Not until the Christian tradition was firmly established is there any trace of its being recorded in writing. Nor even then was any systematic record made. There was a "pattern of sound words" which Timothy was charged by St. Paul to hold in faith and love, but the earnestness with which he was urged to guard the deposit shows that reliance was put on oral tradition and memory. The writings of the Apostles are local and occasional; they assume the teaching which they illustrate. lections were made by individual writers of the sayings and doings of the Lord; they were numerous, as we know from the preface to St. Luke's Gospel; they were but fragmentary, as the concluding words of St. John's Gospel aver. Of these collections we retain four, and some doubtful fragments of others. There is no trace of any orderly and systematic reduction to writing of the whole Christian tradition.2

Col

In the course of time however the Christian writings acquired a new importance. They were documents. The record of the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ is matter of history, and for history the importance of documentary evidence can hardly be exaggerated. An age which knew nothing of the science of historical criticism was nevertheless led to guard these documents with jealous care. They were not a complete record, but they were invaluable as means of testing the accurate Eph. iv. 4, 5.

2 2 Tim. i. 13, 14. Compare 1 Tim. vi. 3, 20.

persistence of the tradition received. There was a negative test. In the course of his controversy about the rebaptism of heretics St. Cyprian put the question whether it was written in the Gospels, the Epistles, or the Acts of the Apostles, that heretics should be received without baptism; if it were so, then the authority of the written record must prevail; if not, then the custom of the Church to the contrary must be upheld. There was also a positive test. St. Athanasius ridiculed the eagerness of the Arians to hold Councils for the discussion of doctrine; the Holy Scripture, he said, was the surer test of true teaching. Tertullian indeed spoke slightingly of the appeal to Scripture; he would rely rather on the Rule of Faith, the oral teaching of the Church given at baptism. But the contrary opinion prevailed. It was thought unsafe to press any teaching for which support could not be found in the sacred writings. From the fourth century onward there was a general adoption of the rule to which the English Church has given emphatic approval, that no man may be required to believe, as necessary to salvation, anything which cannot be proved out of Holy Scripture. St. Athanasius, after enumerating the books of the Old and New Testaments, says, "These are the fountains of salvation, so that he who thirsts may be satiated with the oracles contained therein; in these alone is declared the schooling of religion; let no one add hereto or take aught herefrom." The Church was still the teacher, the guardian, the interpreter of the Christian tradition, but the current record was to be verified by the documentary evidence. The infallible rule of faith, says Bramhall, is Holy Scripture interpreted by the Catholic Church.1

1 Cyprian, Epist. lxxiv. p. 800, ed. Hartel; Athanasius, De Syn. Arim. et Sel., tom. i. p. 873, ed. Colon; Tertullian, De Praescr., 13-19; Athanasius, tom. ii. p. 39; Bramhall, Works, vol.

But what is Holy Scripture? The books of the New Testament are no systematic record of Christian doctrine, complete and self-contained. Neither, on the other hand, are they the only books of the kind. Many others at one time existed, some few survive to our day. Those included in the Canon of Scripture seem on the face of things to be arbitrarily selected. There is no apparent reason why the Epistle to the Hebrews should be included, the Epistle of St. Clement to the Corinthians excluded; why two short private letters of St. John are preserved, while other more public writings of the Apostles are lost to memory; why four Gospels were received, and the many others of which St. Luke speaks, and the Logia, or collected sayings of the Lord current in the first age, were rejected. The Epistle of St. Barnabas was for a time accepted in some places as canonical, the Revelation of St. John was rejected. Not until the end of the fourth century were the books of the New Testament universally received as we now have them.

The selection of these books was the work of the Church. It was not a conscious and deliberate selection made at any set time. Of the Holy Scripture, as of the whole sacred tradition, the Church was not the originator but the guardian; no book could be raised to this level or degraded at the arbitrary bidding of ecclesiastical authority. The Church merely noted and recorded the fact that certain books had been received as genuine records. The Canon was the result of concurrent traditions in all parts of the Church. A book

ii. p. 22, ed. 1842. A long list of quotations from the Fathers on this head will be found in Goode's Divine Rule of Faith and Practice, vol. iii. pp. 29-211. Compare Pusey, Eirenicon, part i. pp. 336-351.

received in some few places but rejected by the Church at large was put aside for lack of this concurrent testimony. A book ignored in one or two places only was eventually received everywhere on the strength of the general tradition. The testimony of the Church is that these books do as a matter of fact contain the teaching of the Lord himself, as delivered by those who were his eye-witnesses from the beginning.

This is in the first place purely a matter of historical fact. As so regarded, the testimony of tradition might conceivably be overthrown by other evidence. The continuous tradition of a society like the Christian Church will carry great weight with all reasonable men, but it cannot amount to absolutely conclusive evidence. The writings of the New Testament are therefore tested by scholarship and criticism, like any other books. If when so tested they were found to be altogether different from what they profess to be, if they proved to be forgeries or late compilations of doubtful legends, then the foundations would indeed be cast down; the Church would be shown to have been a faithless or incompetent guardian of tradition, and we should have no certain knowledge about any teaching of our Master. But in fact the most rigid and unsparing criticism has served only to establish in the main the authenticity of the books, and the accuracy of the tradition by which we have received them. This being so far established, we may accept that tradition with the more confidence where verification is doubtful.

In this way the genuineness of the tradition is vindicated even to those that are without. But for him who has once adopted the standpoint of the disciple, there is much stronger confirmation. Accepting the teaching and the promises of the Lord, he has an over