in general vogue, yet the evangelical histories, into which they were afterwards embodied, were not then in being.  But the converse of this view of the case leads us to the same conclusion.  The Apostolical Fathers quote sayings of Christ which are not found in our Gospels....  There is no proof that our New Testament was in existence during the lives of the Apostolical Fathers, who, therefore, could not make citations out of books which they had never seen” ("Christian Records,” pp. 51-53).  “There is no evidence that they [the four Gospels] existed earlier than the middle of the second century, for they are not named by any writer who lived before that time” (Ibid, p. 56).  In searching for evidence of the existence of the Gospels during the earlier period of the Church’s history, Christian apologists have hitherto been content to seize upon a phrase here and there somewhat resembling a phrase in the canonical Gospels, and to put that forward as a proof that the Gospels then were the same as those we have now.  This rough-and-ready plan must now be given up, since the most learned Christian writers now agree, with the Freethinkers, that such a method is thoroughly unsatisfactory.

Yet, again, admitting these writers as witnesses, and allowing that they quote from the same Gospels, their quotations only prove that the isolated phrases they use were in the Gospels of their day, and are also in the present ones; and many such cases might occur in spite of great variations in the remainder of the respective Gospels, and would by no means prove that the Gospels they used were identical with ours.  If Josephus, for instance, had ever quoted some sentences of Socrates recorded by Plato, that quotation, supposing that Josephus were reliable, would prove that Plato and Socrates both lived before Josephus, and that Plato wrote down some of the sayings of Socrates; but it would not prove that a version of Plato in our hands to-day was identical with that used by Josephus.  The scattered and isolated passages woven in by the Fathers in their works would fail to prove the identity of the Gospels of the second century with those of the nineteenth, even were they as like parallel passages in the canonical Gospels as they are unlike them.

It is “important,” says the able anonymous writer of “Supernatural Religion,” “that we should constantly bear in mind that a great number of Gospels existed in the early Church which are no longer extant, and of most of which even the names are lost.  We will not here do more than refer, in corroboration of this fact, to the preliminary statement of the author of the third Gospel:  ’Forasmuch as many ([Greek:  polloi]) have taken in hand to set forth a declaration of those things which are surely believed among us, etc.’  It is, therefore, evident that before our third synoptic was written, many similar works were already in circulation.  Looking at the close similarity of the large portions of the three synoptics, it is almost certain that