as sufficient testimony—­if they could, under any circumstances, be considered sufficient testimony—­for miracles and a direct Divine Revelation like ecclesiastical Christianity.” [132:1]

Dr. Lightfoot must have been aware of these statements, since he has made the paragraph on the silence of ancient writers the basis of his essay on the silence of Eusebius, and has been so particular in calling attention to any alteration I have made in my text; and it might have been better if, instead of cheap sneers on every occasion in which these canons have been applied, he had once for all stated any reasons which he can bring forward against the canons themselves.  The course he has adopted, I can well understand, is more convenient for him and, after all, with many it is quite as effective.

It may be well that I should here again illustrate the necessity for such canons of criticism as I have indicated above, and which can be done very simply from our own Gospels: 

“Not only the language but the order of a quotation must have its due weight, and we have no right to dismember a passage and, discovering fragmentary parallels in various parts of the Gospels, to assert that it is compiled from them and not derived, as it stands, from another source.  As an illustration, let us for a moment suppose the ‘Gospel according to Luke’ to have been lost, like the ‘Gospel according to the Hebrews’ and so many others.  In the works of one of the Fathers we discover the following quotation from an unnamed evangelical work:  ’And he said unto them ([Greek:  elegen de pros autous]):  ’The harvest truly is great, but the labourers are few; pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest that he would send forth labourers into his harvest.  Go your ways ([Greek:  hupagete]):  behold, I send you forth as lambs ([Greek:  arnas]) in the midst of wolves.’  Following the system adopted in regard to Justin and others, apologetic critics would of course maintain that this was a compilation from memory of passages quoted from our first Gospel—­that is to say, Matt ix, 37:  ’Then saith he unto his disciples ([Greek:  tote legei tois mathetais autou]), The harvest,’ &c.; and Matt. x. 16:  ’Behold, I ([Greek:  ego]) send you forth as sheep’ ([Greek:  probata]) in the midst of wolves:  be ye therefore,’ &c., which, with the differences which we have indicated, agree.  It would probably be in vain to argue that the quotation indicated a continuous order, and the variations combined to confirm the probability of a different source, and still more so to point out that, although parts of the quotation, separated from their context, might, to a certain extent, correspond with scattered verses in the first Gospel, such a circumstance was no proof that the quotation was taken from that and from no other Gospel.  The passage, however, is a literal quotation from Luke x. 2-3, which, as we have assumed, had been lost.

“Again, still supposing the third