tolic teaching (_Didache_) on the subjects in question. This is
probably a _bona fide_ claim. It expresses the feeling common to the
Apostolic Fathers and general in the sub-apostolic age, at any rate in
regions where apostles had once laboured, that local tradition, as held
by the recognized church leaders, did but continue apostolic doctrine
and practice. Into later developments of this feeling an increasing
element of illusion entered, and all other written embodiments of it
known to us take the form of literary fictions, more or less bold. It is
in contrast to these that the _Didache_ is justly felt to be genuinely
primitive and of a piece with the Apostolic Fathers. Thus while its form
would by analogy tend _per se_ to awaken suspicion, its contents remove
this feeling; and we may even infer from this surviving early
formulation of local ecclesiastical tradition, that others of somewhat
similar character came into being in the sub-apostolic age, but failed
to survive save as embodied in later local teaching, oral or written,
very much as if the _Didache_ had perished and its literary offspring
alone remained (see DIDACHE).

As regards Papias's _Exposition_, which Lightfoot describes as "among
the earliest forerunners of commentaries, partly explanatory, partly
illustrative, on portions of the New Testament," we need here only
remark that, whatever its exact form may have been--as to which the
extant fragments still leave room for doubt--it was in conception
expository of the historic meaning of Christ's more ambiguous Sayings,
viewed in the light of definitely ascertained apostolic traditions
bearing on the subject. The like is true also of the fragments of the
Elders preserved in Irenaeus (so far as these do not really come from
Papias). Both bodies of exposition represent the traditional principle
at work in the sub-apostolic age, making for the preservation in
relative purity, over against merely subjective interpretations--those
of the Gnostics in particular--of the historic or original sense of
Christ's teaching, just as Ignatius stood for the historicity of the
facts of His earthly career in their plain, natural sense.

(B) Here the question of external form passes readily over into that of
the _internal character and spirit_. Indeed much has already been said
or suggested bearing on these. The relation of these writers to the
apostolic teaching generally has become pretty evident. It is one of
absolute loya