Page:Apocryphal Gospels and Other Documents Relating to the History of Christ.djvu/49

and founded upon the same. The picture is very humiliating, but the contrivance has been remarkably successful, and old falsehoods have been preferred to older truths. I do not think any sane man would raise any of these books to the dignity of real history; and yet the unreasoning adoption, by men of repute, of things borrowed from them, has been turned to good account. John of Damascus hashes up the stories which he finds in these books, and his hash is dished up in the Breviary; while the books he took his material from are condemned by popes and councils. In like manner numerous localities are accounted particularly sacred in consequence of incidents, the sole record of which is in the Christian Apocrypha. They pretend to show, at Rome and other places, at least one relic, the preservation of which is recorded in an apocryphal book (Arabic Gospel, chap. v. pp. 174, 175). Events and persons mentioned only in the false Gospels are solemnly commemorated; among the latter I will only mention Joachim and Anna, and among the former the feast of the immaculate conception of Mary. Joachim and Anna are purely apocryphal names, and yet the latter is one of the principal saints, and the following paragraph from a newspaper, published in September