t these, I know not how, promising to deliver my opinion, (see
Galatians as above) take upon them to explain the words they
heard from me, better than I that spoke them; telling their disciples,
my sense was that of which I had not so much as thought. Now, if
in my own life time, they dare feign such things, how much more
will those that come after, do the same."

APPENDIX C.

Extract from Dodwell's Dissertations on Irenaeus, Diss. 1, p.p. 38,
39.

"The Canonical writings (i. e. of the New Testament), lay
concealed in the coffers of private churches, or persons, till the
latter times of Trajan, or rather perhaps of Adrian; so that they
could not come to the knowledge of the church. For if they had
been published, they would have been overwhelmed under such a
multitude as were then of apocryphal and suppositious books, that
a new examination and a new testimony would be necessary to
distinguish them from these false ones. And it is from this new
testimony (whereby the genuine writings of the apostles were
distinguished from the spurious pieces which went under their
names,) that depends all the authority which the truly apostolic
writings have formerly obtained, or which they have at present in
the Catholic Church. But this fresh attestation of the canon is
subject to the same inconveniences with those traditions of the
ancient persons that I defend, and whom Irenaeus both heard and
saw; for it is equally distant from the original, and could not be
made except by such only as had reached those remote times. But
it is very certain that before the period I mentioned of Trajan's
time, the canon of the sacred books, was not yet fixed, nor any
certain number of books received in the Catholic Church, whose
authority must ever after serve to determine matters of faith;
neither were the spurious pieces of heretics yet rejected, nor were
the faithful admonished to beware of them for the future. Likewise,
the true writings of the apostles used to be so bound up in one
volume with the apocryphal, that it was not manifest by any mark
of public censure which of them should be preferred to the other.
We have at this day, certain authentic writings of ecclesiastical
authors of those times, as Clemens Romanus, Barnabas, Hermas,
Ignatius, and Polycarp, who wrote in the same order wherein I
have named them, and after all the other writers of the New
Testament, except Jude, and the two Johns. But in Hermas you
shall not meet with