holy book of the Christian Church, gave to the book a significance altogether different from that which its constituent elements must have had for men to whom they had appeared as but the natural literary deposit of the religious movement of the apostolic age.  This apprehension took possession of the mind of the Christian community.  It was made the subject of deliverances by councils of the Church.  How did this great transformation take place?  Was it an isolated achievement, or was it part of a general movement?  Did not this development of life in the Christian communities which gave them a New Testament belong to an evolution which gave them also the so-called Apostles’ Creed and a monarchical organisation of the Church and the beginnings of a ritual of worship?

It is clear that we have here a question of greatest moment.  With the rise of this idea of the canon, with the assigning to this body of literature the character of Scripture, we have the beginning of the larger mastery which the New Testament has exerted over the minds and life of men.  Compared with this question, investigations as to the authorship and as to the time, place and circumstance of the production of particular books, came, for the time, to occupy a secondary rank.  As they have emerged again, they wear a new aspect and are approached in a different spirit.  The writings are revealed as belonging to a far larger context, that of the whole body of the Christian literature of the age.  It in no way follows from that which we have said that the body of documents, which ultimately found themselves together in the New Testament, have not a unity other than the outward one which was by consensus of opinion or conciliar decree imposed upon them.  They do represent, in the large and in varying degrees, an inward and spiritual unity.  There was an inspiration of the main body of these writings, the outward condition of which, at all events, was the nearness of their writers to Jesus or to his eye-witnesses, and the consequence of which was the unique relation which the more important of these documents historically bore to the formation of the Christian Church.  There was a heaven which lay about the infancy of Christianity which only slowly faded into the common light of day.  That heaven was the spirit of the Master himself.  The chief of these writings do centrally enshrine the first pure illumination of that spirit.  But the churchmen who made the canon and the Fathers who argued about it very often gave mistaken reasons for facts in respect of which they nevertheless were right.  They gave what they considered sound external reasons.  They alleged apostolic authorship.  They should have been content with internal evidence and spiritual effectiveness.  The apostles had come, in the mind of the early Church, to occupy a place of unique distinction.  Writings long enshrined in affection for their potent influence, but whose origin had not been much considered, were now assigned to apostles, that they might have