ters reach this point, great suspicion attaches to
those who hold fast their religious independence and wish to apply the
old standards. Not only do they seem arrogant and proud, but they also
appear disturbers of the necessary new arrangement which has its
justification in the fact of its being unavoidable. This development of
the matter was, moreover, of the greatest significance for the history
of the canon. Its creation very speedily resulted in the opinion that
the time of divine revelation had gone past and was exhausted in the
Apostles, that is, in the records left by them. We cannot prove with
certainty that the canon was formed to confirm this opinion, but we can
show that it was very soon used to oppose those Christians who professed
to be prophets or appealed to the continuance of prophecy. The influence
which the canon exercised in this respect is the most decisive and
important. That which Tertullian, as a Montanist, asserts of one of his
opponents: "Prophetiam expulit, paracletum fugavit" ("he expelled
prophecy, he drove away the Paraclete"), can be far more truly said of
the New Testament which the same Tertullian as a Catholic recognised.
The New Testament, though not all at once, put an end to a situation
where it was possible for any Christian under the inspiration of the
Spirit to give authoritative disclosures and instructions. It likewise
prevented belief in the fanciful creations with which such men enriched
the history of the past, and destroyed their pretensions to read the
future. As the creation of the canon, though not in a hard and fast way,
fixed the period of the production of sacred facts, so it put down all
claims of Christian prophecy to public credence. Through the canon it
came to be acknowledged that all post-apostolic Christianity is only of
a mediate and particular kind, and can therefore never be itself a
standard. The Apostles alone possessed the Spirit of God completely and
without measure. They only, therefore, are the media of revelation, and
by their word alone, which, as emanating from the Spirit, is of equal
authority with the word of Christ, all that is Christian must be
tested.[103]

The Holy Spirit and the Apostles became correlative conceptions
(Tertull., de pudic. 21). The Apostles, however, were more and more
overshadowed by the New Testament Scriptures; and this was in fact an
advance beyond the earlier state of things, for what was known of the
Apostles? Accordingly,