But there is a further objection to be made to the procedure in ‘Supernatural Religion.’  If the object were to obtain clear and simple and universally appreciable evidence, I do not hesitate to say that the enquiry ends just where it ought to have begun.  Through the faulty method that he has employed the author forgets that he has a hypothesis to make good and to carry through.  He forgets that he has to account on the negative theory, just as we account on the positive, for a definite state of things.  It may sound paradoxical, but there is really no great boldness in the paradox, when we affirm that at least the high antiquity of the Gospels could be proved, even if not one jot or tittle of the evidence that we have been discussing had existed.  Supposing that all those fragmentary remains of the primitive Christian literature that we have been ransacking so minutely had been swept away, supposing that the causes that have handed it down to us in such a mutilated and impaired condition had done their work still more effectually, and that for the first eighty years of the second century there was no Christian literature extant at all; still I maintain that, in order to explain the phenomena that we find after that date, we should have to recur to the same assumptions that our previous enquiry would seem to have established for us.

Hitherto we have had to grope our way with difficulty and care; but from this date onwards all ambiguity and uncertainty disappears.  It is like emerging out of twilight into the broad blaze of day.  There is really a greater disproportion than we might expect between the evidence of the end of the century and that which leads up to it.  From Justin to Irenaeus the Christian writings are fragmentary and few, but with Irenaeus a whole body of literature seems suddenly to start into being.  Irenaeus is succeeded closely by Clement of Alexandria, Clement by Tertullian, Tertullian by Hippolytus and Origen, and the testimony which these writers bear to the Gospel is marvellously abundant and unanimous.  I calculate roughly that Irenaeus quotes directly 193 verses of the first Gospel and 73 of the fourth.  Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian must have quoted considerably more, while in the extant writings of Origen the greater part of the New Testament is actually quoted [Endnote 315:1].

But more than this; by the time of Irenaeus the canon of the four Gospels, as we understand the word now, was practically formed.  We have already seen that this was the case in the fragment of Muratori.  Irenaeus is still more explicit.  In the famous passage [Endnote 315:2] which is so often quoted as an instance of the weak-mindedness of the Fathers, he lays it down as a necessity of things that the Gospels should be four in number, neither less nor more:—­