organisation of the Church
and the beginnings of a ritual of worship?

It is clear that we have here a question of greatest moment. With the
rise of this idea of the canon, with the assigning to this body of
literature the character of Scripture, we have the beginning of the
larger mastery which the New Testament has exerted over the minds and
life of men. Compared with this question, investigations as to the
authorship and as to the time, place and circumstance of the production
of particular books, came, for the time, to occupy a secondary rank. As
they have emerged again, they wear a new aspect and are approached in a
different spirit. The writings are revealed as belonging to a far larger
context, that of the whole body of the Christian literature of the age.
It in no way follows from that which we have said that the body of
documents, which ultimately found themselves together in the New
Testament, have not a unity other than the outward one which was by
consensus of opinion or conciliar decree imposed upon them. They do
represent, in the large and in varying degrees, an inward and spiritual
unity. There was an inspiration of the main body of these writings, the
outward condition of which, at all events, was the nearness of their
writers to Jesus or to his eye-witnesses, and the consequence of which
was the unique relation which the more important of these documents
historically bore to the formation of the Christian Church. There was a
heaven which lay about the infancy of Christianity which only slowly
faded into the common light of day. That heaven was the spirit of the
Master himself. The chief of these writings do centrally enshrine the
first pure illumination of that spirit. But the churchmen who made the
canon and the Fathers who argued about it very often gave mistaken
reasons for facts in respect of which they nevertheless were right. They
gave what they considered sound external reasons. They alleged apostolic
authorship. They should have been content with internal evidence and
spiritual effectiveness. The apostles had come, in the mind of the early
Church, to occupy a place of unique distinction. Writings long enshrined
in affection for their potent influence, but whose origin had not been
much considered, were now assigned to apostles, that they might have
authority and distinction. The theory of the canon came after the fact.
The theory was often wrong. The canon had been, in the main and in its
inwar