to great and venerable names, from the Sibylline verses, and several
suppositious productions which were spread abroad in this and the
following century. It does not, indeed, seem probable that all these
pious frauds were chargeable upon the professors of real Christianity,
upon those who entertained just and rational sentiments of the religion
of Jesus. The greatest part of these fictitious writings undoubtedly
flowed from the fertile invention of the Gnostic sects, though it cannot
be affirmed that even true Christians were entirely innocent and
irreproachable in this matter" (Ibid, p. 55). "This disingenuous and
vicious method of surprising their adversaries by artifice, and striking
them down, as it were, by lies and fiction, produced, among other
disagreeable effects, a great number of books, which were falsely
attributed to certain great men, in order to give these spurious
productions more credit and weight" (Ibid, page 77). These forged
writings being so widely circulated, it will be readily understood that
"It is not so easy a matter as is commonly imagined rightly to settle
the Canon of the New Testament. For my own part, I declare, with many
learned men, that, in the whole compass of learning, I know no question
involved with more intricacies and perplexing difficulties than this.
There are, indeed, considerable difficulties relating to the Canon of
the Old Testament, as appears by the large controversies between the
Protestants and Papists on this head in the last, and latter end of the
preceding, century; but these are solved with much more ease than those
of the New.... In settling the old Testament collection, all that is
requisite is to disprove the claim of a few obscure books, which have
but the weakest pretences to be looked upon as Scripture; but, in the
New, we have not only a few to disprove, but a vast number to exclude
[from] the Canon, which seem to have much more right to admission than
any of the apocryphal books of the Old Testament; and, besides, to
evidence the genuineness of all those which we do receive, since,