nt
societies. It is now only about one hundred and fifty years since Christ
was crucified; and within this period, to say nothing of the apostolical
fathers who have been noticed already, we have Justin Martyr at
Neapolis, Theophilus at Antioch, Irenaeus in France, Clement at
Alexandria, Tertullian at Carthage, quoting the same books of historical
Scriptures, and I may say, quoting these alone.

XIII. An interval of only thirty years, and that occupied by no small
number of Christian writers, (Minucius Felix, Apollonius, Caius, Asterius
Urbanus Alexander bishop of Jerusalem, Hippolytus, Ammonius Julius
Africanus) whose works only remain in fragments and quotations, and in
every one of which is some reference or other to the Gospels (and in one
of them, Hippolytus, as preserved in Theodoret, is an abstract of the
whole Gospel history), brings us to a name of great celebrity in
Christian antiquity, Origen (Lardner, vol. iii. p. 234.) of Alexandria,
who in the quantity of his writings exceeded the most laborious of the
Greek and Latin authors. Nothing can be more peremptory upon the subject
now under consideration, and, from a writer of his learning and
information, more satisfactory, than the declaration of Origen,
preserved, in an extract from his works, by Eusebius; "That the four
Gospels alone are received without dispute by the whole church of God
under heaven:" to which declaration is immediately subjoined a brief
history of the respective authors to whom they were then, as they are
now, ascribed. The language holden concerning the Gospels, throughout
the works of Origen which remain, entirely corresponds with the
testimony here cited. His attestation to the Acts of the Apostles is no
less Positive: "And Luke also once more sounds the trumpet, relating the
acts of the apostles." The universality with which the Scriptures were
then read is well signified by this writer in a passage in which he has
occasion to observe against Celsus, "That it is not in any private
books, or such as are read by a few only, and those studious persons,
but in books read by everybody, That it is written, The invisible things
of God from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood
by things that are made." It is to no purpose to single out quotations
of Scripture from such a writer as this. We might as well make a
selection of the quotations of Scripture in Dr. Clarke's Sermons. They
are so thickly sown in the works of Orig