ng of, making only such alterations
as would be natural in the reproduction of such an account for those who
were without the pale of the Church.

But even this is not the climax of the absurdity which we are told that,
if we are reasonable persons, we must accept. It appears that the
"Memoirs" which, we are told, Justin heard read every Sunday in the
place of assembly in Rome or Ephesus which he frequented, was a
Palestinian Gospel, which combined, in one narrative, the accounts of
the Birth, Life, Death, and moral Teaching of Jesus, together with the
peculiar doctrine and history now only to be found in the Fourth Gospel.
Consequently this Gospel was not only far more valuable than any one of
our present Evangelists, but, we might almost say, more worthy of
preservation than all put together, for it combined the teaching of the
four, and no doubt reconciled their seeming discrepancies, thus
obviating one of the greatest difficulties connected with their
authority and inspiration; a difficulty which, we learn from history,
was felt from the first. And yet, within less than twenty years, this
Gospel had been supplanted by four others so effectually that it was all
but forgotten at the end of the century, and is referred to by the first
ecclesiastical historian as one of many apocrypha valued only by a local
Church, and has now perished so utterly that not one fragment of it can
be proved to be authentic.

But enough of this absurdity.

Taking with us the patent fact, that before the end of the second
century, and during the first half of the third, the Four Gospels were
accepted by the Church generally, and quoted by every Christian writer
as fully as they are at this moment, can there be the shadow of a doubt
that when Justin wrote the account of our Lord's Birth, which I have
given in page 22, he had before him the first and third Evangelists, and
combined these two accounts in one narrative? Whether he does this
consciously and of set purpose I leave to the author of "Supernatural
Religion," but combine the two accounts he certainly does.

Again, when, in the accounts of the events preceding our Lord's Death,
Justin notices that Jesus commanded the disciples to bring forth an ass
and its foal (page 33), can any reasonable man doubt but that he owed
this to St. Matthew, in whose Gospel alone it appears?

Or when, in the extract I have given in page 20, he notices that our
Lord called the sons of Zebedee Boanerges