several ways, but this latter assertion I have not as yet sufficiently supported. In doing so, I shall attempt to present a truth as well as expose an error.
The key-note of the book, the animus of it, comes out in the phrase which I have quoted from its title-page, and which speaks of writings ‘not included in the New Testament by its compilers’. The words call up a picture of a number of men—probably bishops in mitres—seated round a table piled with rolls and books. One pile is labelled ‘Gospels’, another ‘Epistles’, and so on. The members of this committee examine each volume with more or less care: most of them are put aside with gestures of disapproval. Finally a small selection is made, and entrusted to the chairman, who draws up a careful list of its contents, and subsequently, no doubt, hands it over to a publisher with a proper authorization. In due time the New Testament ‘collected into a volume’ is disseminated throughout the Christian world. I really believe that something not very unlike this fable is fairly deducible from Hone’s prefaces.
The fallacy which dominates it is the notion that the writings which comprise our New Testament were ‘collected into a volume’ at a given moment by a definite act of the authorities of the Church. Those who have read any modern elementary account of the formation of the Canon are aware that the processes of inclusion and exclusion were gradual: that by the end of the second century we find the Four Gospels in a secure position, and Irenaeus arguing from the analogy of nature that there could be no more and no fewer than four: that the Pauline Epistles are already formed into a collection: that the authority of the Acts is not doubted. Doubt, indeed, really attaches only to some of the lesser Epistles, and the Revelation: and the grounds of doubt are various, the Revelation, for instance, being disliked for its teaching about the millennium or its obscurity, and some of the minor Epistles failing to find recognition from their shortness and relative unimportance. Exceptional (within the Church) is the attitude of a party (so obscure is its history that we are not sure whether it was a group of people or a single writer) who in the second century rejected the Johannine writings in bulk.
The details of all this must be sought in professed histories of the Canon: only the most general statements can find
