ere common baptismal gifts during the 15th and
16th centuries, but were dying out by 1666. Often single spoons were
given, bearing the figure of the patron or name saint of the child. Sets
of the twelve apostles are not common, and complete sets of thirteen,
with the figure of our Lord on a larger spoon, are still rarer. The
Goldsmiths' Company in London has one such set, all by the same maker
and bearing the hall-mark of 1626, and a set of thirteen was sold at
Christie's in 1904 for L4900.

See William Hone, _The Everyday Book_ and _Table Book_ (1831); and
W.J. Cripps, _Old English Plate_ (9th ed., 1906).

APOSTOLICAL CONSTITUTIONS ([Greek: Diatagai] _or_ [Greek: Diataxeis ton
agion apostolon dia Klaementos tou Rhomaion episkopou te kai politou.
Katholikae didaskalia]), a collection of ecclesiastical regulations in
eight books, the last of which concludes with the eighty-five _Canons of
the Holy Apostles_. By their title the Constitutions profess to have
been drawn up by the apostles, and to have been transmitted to the
Church by Clement of Rome; sometimes the alleged authors are represented
as speaking jointly, sometimes singly. From the first they have been
very variously estimated; the _Canons_, as a rule, more highly than the
rest of the work. For example, the Trullan Council of Constantinople
(_quini-sextum_), A.D. 692, accepts the Canons as genuine by its second
canon, but rejects the Constitutions on the ground that spurious matter
had been introduced into them by heretics; and whilst the former were
henceforward used freely in the East, only a few portions of the latter
found their way into the Greek and oriental law-books. Again, Dionysius
Exiguus (c. A.D. 500) translated fifty of the Canons into Latin,[1]
although under the title _Canones qui dicuntur Apostolorum_, and thus
they passed into other Western collections; whilst the Constitutions as
a whole remained unknown in the West until they were published in 1563
by the Jesuit Turrianus. At first received with enthusiasm, their
authenticity soon came to be impugned; and their true significance was
largely lost sight of as it began to be realized that they were not what
they claimed to be. Vain attempts were still made to rehabilitate them,
and they were, in general, more highly estimated in England than
elsewhere. The most extravagant estimate of all was that of Whiston, who
calls them "the most sacred standard of Christianity, equal in authority