The fifth canon ordained that first fruits and tithes should be sent to the house of the bishops and priests, and not to be offered upon the altar. The Greek word in the copy is not δεκασμούς. No solid argument for the payment of tithes can be founded on this canon, for if we take the custom of the Anglo-Saxon Churches at the end of the sixth century, which was in accordance with that in primitive times, we find no account for the payment of tithes. “There is no mention of tithes,” says Lord Selborne, “in any part of the ancient canon law of the Roman Church, collected towards the end of the fifth century by Dionysius (called Exiguus or the Little), a Scythian monk who collected 401 Oriental and African canons.”[6] The monks in their cells had sufficient leisure to concoct these Constitutions, and palm them on the credulous as the genuine production of the Apostles. The concocted Constitutions were copied and handed down from century to century without any attempt being made to test their genuineness and authenticity. It seems exceedingly strange that African divines and laymen should refer to the Apostolical Constitutions as an authority for the payment of tithes in apostolic times, although Cardinal Bellarmine, a great champion of “Holy Church,” ignored them.[7] Churchmen like Archdeacon Tillesley, many of whom are in the receipt of tithes or tithe-rent charges, will naturally act like drowning men, and snatch even at passing straws to save the tithes. Could anything, for example, be more childish and absurd than the story of tracing the payment of tithes to Adam? And what makes the case worse is to distort Scripture so as to deceive the people who could neither read nor write, and even those who could read had no open Bible to consult to see for themselves whether these things were so. Members of the Anglican Church forget when using such weapons as the “Constitutions” in support of tithes, that the very cause of the English Reformation in the sixteenth century was the adoption into the English Church of the traditions and errors of the Church of Rome, which were said to have been handed down by the Apostles in the so-called Apostolical Constitutions, although many of them can be shown to be contrary to the Scriptures. Archdeacon Tillesley does not defend the whole volume of the so-called Constitutions of Clement I., but he does that part which deals with the payment of tithes. He evidently had forgotten the mechanical axiom, that nothing is stronger than its weakest part. “Because the early Christians,” he says, “were liberal to the Church, therefore it was reasonable that tithes in the ‘Constitutional Apostolical’ were true.” Nothing of the sort, because it does not follow as a logical sequence.