In Apostolical times the Christian ministers were supported by voluntary contributions out of a common fund, and this practice prevailed for four hundred years.[4] Those who preached the Gospel lived by the Gospel, but this Scriptural statement did not mean, as some assert, that they were to live on the payment of tithes, otherwise it would have been stated. St. Paul ordered weekly collections to be made for the saints in the Churches of Galatia and Corinth (1 Cor. xvi. 1, 2). The voluntary contributions of the faithful were collected and put into a common treasure (Acts ii. 44; iv. 34). The liberality of the Christians then far exceeded anything which could have been collected from tithes. And even if tithes had been exacted, it is exceedingly doubtful whether the progress of Christianity would not have been materially checked at its outset. The Jewish Law, as regards the payment of tithes, was not binding on Christians, no more than the custom of bigamy and polygamy adopted by the Israelites is binding on the Christian Church. There is no injunction in the New Testament binding Christians to pay tithes to their ministers. And when the payment was first urged in the Christian Church, it was supported by references to the Mosaic Law and not to St. Paul’s words, viz., “That those who preach the Gospel should live of the Gospel.” There was a growing habit of looking upon the clergy as the successors and representatives of the Levites under the Old Law, and this habit had given an impulse to that claim which they set up to the payment of tithes by the laity.[5] The Apostolical Constitutions for the Christian Church, collected, as it is alleged, by Pope Clement I., the successor as is said of St. Peter, first bishop of Rome, were fabricated more than eight centuries after apostolical times. Cardinal Bellarmine is honest enough to ignore them. But they imposed on the credulous and were accepted without criticism as genuine, even by canonists, in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Selden thinks they were concocted about A.D. 1000; others think in 1042. In these Constitutions tithes are stated to have been paid by the Christians to the Apostles. Sir H. Spelman (p. 108) thinks the first thirty-five canons are very ancient. “Dionysius Exiguus,” he says, “who lived within 400 years after the Apostles, translated them out of Greek.”