no question of any one’s having excluded them from the New Testament: they have done that for themselves.
Interesting as they are—and I will try to show later why they are interesting—they do not achieve either of the two principal purposes for which they were written, the instilling of true religion and the conveyance of true history. As religious books they were meant to reinforce the existing stock of Christian beliefs: either by revealing new doctrines—usually differing from those which held the field; or by interpreting old ones—again, usually in a fresh sense; or by extolling some special virtue, as chastity or temperance; or by enforcing belief in certain doctrines or events, e. g. the Virgin birth, the resurrection of Christ, the second coming, the future state—by the production of evidence which, if true, should be irrefragable. For all these purposes the highest authority is claimed by the writings; they are the work, they tell us, of eyewitnesses of the events, or they report the utterances of the Lord himself. As books of history they aim at supplementing the scanty data (as they seemed) of the Gospels and Acts, and in this they resemble many of the Jewish Midrashim and apocrypha. Like these, they sometimes bear testimony to the currency of a tradition which has other and better evidence to support it, as when the Acts of John assume John’s residence at Ephesus, and the Acts of Peter and Paul the martyrdom of those apostles at Rome.
But, as I have said, they fail of their purpose. Among the prayers and discourses of the apostles in the spurious Acts some utterances may be found which are remarkable and even beautiful: not a few of the stories are notable and imaginative, and have been consecrated and made familiar to us by the genius of mediaeval artists. But the authors do not speak with the voices of Paul or of John, or with the quiet simplicity of the three first Gospels. It is not unfair to say that when they attempt the former tone, they are theatrical, and when they essay the latter, they are jejune. In short, the result of anything like an attentive study of the literature, in bulk and in detail, is an added respect for the sense of the Church Catholic, and for the wisdom of the scholars of Alexandria, Antioch, and Rome: assuredly in this case they were tried money-changers, who proved all things and held fast that which was good. Many
