se circumstances
together point to an antiquity fully as great as any that an
orthodox critic would claim.

It should not be thought that because such indications are
indirect they are therefore any the less certain. There is perhaps
hardly a single uncanonical Christian document that is admittedly
and indubitably older than Marcion; so that direct evidence there
is naturally none. But neither is there any direct evidence for
the antiquity of man or of the earth. The geologist judges by the
fossils which he finds embedded in the strata as relics of an
extinct age; so here, in the Gospel of Marcion, do we find relics
which to the initiated eye carry with them their own story.

Nor, on the other hand, can it rightly be argued that because the
history of these remains is not wholly to be recovered, therefore
no inference from them is possible. In the earlier stages of a
science like palaeontology it might have been argued in just the
same way that the difficulties and confusion in the classification
invalidated the science along with its one main inference
altogether. Yet we can see that such an argument would have been
mistaken. There will probably be some points in every science
which will never be cleared up to the end of time. The affirmation
of the antiquity of Marcion's Gospel rests upon the simple axiom
that every event must have a cause, and that in order to produce
complicated phenomena the interaction of complicated causes is
necessary. Such an assumption involves time, and I think it is a
safe proposition to assert that, in order to bring the text of
Marcion's Gospel into the state in which we find it, there must
have been a long previous history, and the manuscripts through
which it was conveyed must have parted far from the parent stem.

The only way in which the inference drawn from the text of
Marcion's Gospel can be really met would be by showing that the
text of the Latin and Syriac translations is older and more
original than that which is universally adopted by text-critics. I
should hardly suppose that the author of 'Supernatural Religion'
will be prepared to maintain this. If he does, the subject can
then be argued. In the meantime, these two arguments, the literary
and the textual--for the others are but subsidiary--must, I think,
be held to prove the high antiquity of our present Gospel.

CHAPTER IX.

TATIAN--DIONYSIUS OF CORINTH.

Tatian was a teacher of rhetoric, an Assyrian by b