Then why, if apocryphal means fabulous or spurious, or both, are
these books, some of which are true and genuine, lumped all together
and called "Apocrypha"? I am sorry to disappoint you, but I cannot go
through the whole history. It is long, it is difficult, and though it
interests me, I am inclined to think it would not interest you unless
I spread it over a great many pages, and filled it out with stories;
and for this I have no time. Let me tell you what strikes me as being
the important thing to bear in mind. Nearly all of these books have
been at some time or another read in church and treated as Scripture.
Nearly all of them are now treated as Scripture by the Roman Church,
but not by most of the Protestant, or Reformed, Churches. They are on
the borderland of the Bible. From having been so long kept together
in a group by themselves, they have come to be thought of as being
all of one uniform kind. But they are not so; they are of very
different sorts and merits.

Let us keep the old name for them and call them "the Apocrypha." It
will be convenient to do so, because I have now to speak of other
apocryphal books, which have never been bound up in our Bibles, but
in older times, before Bibles were printed, were (some of them at
least) read in churches and thought to be sacred books. There are a
great many of these: perhaps, if they were all put together, they
would make up a volume as large as the Old Testament itself; but at
present there is no book in which they are all printed together. Some
are stories, others are visions like those in the Revelation of St.
John, others are psalms and prophecies. But all of them, I think, may
fairly be called either fabulous or spurious, or both.

I can give you an example from the Bible itself to show that there