ith other apocryphal Jewish writings, such as the Fourth
Book of Esdras, the Apocalypse of Henoch, and the Book of Jubilees;
and they may all be regarded as attempts to carry down the spirit of
prophecy beyond the canonical Scriptures, and to furnish a supplement
to them.

So highly prized was this group of apocryphal Jewish oracles by the
primitive Christians, that several new ones were added to them by
Christian hands which have not come down to us in their original
state. They were regarded as genuine productions, possessing an
independent authority which, if not divine, was certainly
supernatural; and some did not hesitate even to place them by the side
of the Old Testament prophecies. In the very earliest controversies
between Christians and the advocates of paganism, they were appealed
to frequently as authorities which both recognised. Christian
apologists of the second century, such as Tatian, Athenagoras, and
very specially Justin Martyr, implicitly relied upon them as
indisputable. Even the oracles of the pagan Sibyl were regarded by
Christian writers with an awe and reverence little short of that which
they inspired in the minds of the heathen themselves. Clement of
Alexandria does not scruple to call the Cumaean Sibyl a true
prophetess, and her oracles saving canticles. And St. Augustine
includes her among the number of those who belong to the "City of
God." And this idea of the Sibyl's sacredness continued to a late age
in the Christian Church. She had a place in the prophetic order beside
the patriarchs and prophets of old, and joined in the great procession
of the witnesses for the faith from Seth and Enoch down to the last
Christian saint and martyr. In one of the grandest hymns of the Roman
Catholic Church, composed by Tommaso di Celano at the beginning of the
fourteenth century, there is an allusion to her, taken from the
well-known acrostic in the last judgment scene in the eighth book of
the _Oracula Sibyllina_--

"Dies irae, dies illa,
Solvet saeclum in favilla,
Teste David cum _Sibylla_."

The strange Italian mystic of the fifteenth century, Pico della
Mirandola, who sought to reconcile the Christian sentiment with the
imagery and legends of pagan religion, rehabilitated the Sibyl, and
consecrated her as the servant of the Lord Jesus. And he was but a
specimen of the many _humanists_ of that age who believed that no
oracle that had once spoken to living men and women could ever who