Page:A General Survey of the History of the Canon of the New Testament (7th edition, 1896).djvu/79

 Rh  books, may be suffered to fall into disuse from having little connexion with the popular views of religion. As a general rule, quotations have a value positively, but not negatively: they may shew that a writing was received as authoritative, but it cannot fairly be argued from this fact alone that another which is not quoted was unknown or rejected as apocryphal.

Still, though the use of Scripture is in a great degree dependent on the character of the controversies of the day, the argument from quotations obtains a new weight in connexion with formal catalogues of the New Testament. It is impossible not to admit that a general coincidence of the range of patristic references with the limits elsewhere assigned to the Canon confirms and settles them. And in this way the history of the Canon can be carried up to times when catalogues could not have been published, but existed only implicitly in the practice of the Churches.

3. The track however which we have to follow is often obscure and broken. The evidence of the earliest Christian writers is not only uncritical and casual: it is also fragmentary. A few letters of consolation and warning, two or three Apologies addressed to Heathen, a controversy with a Jew, a Vision, and a scanty gleaning of fragments of lost works, comprise all Christian literature up to the middle of the second century. And the Fathers of the next age were little fitted by their work to collect the records of their times. Christianity had not yet become a history, but was still a life. In such a case it is obviously unreasonable to expect that multiplicity of evidence and circumstantial detail which may be brought to bear upon questions of modern date.