where it was possible for any Christian under the inspiration of the Spirit to give authoritative disclosures and instructions. It likewise prevented belief in the fanciful creations with which such men enriched the history of the past, and destroyed their pretensions to read the future. As the creation of the canon, though not in a hard and fast way, fixed the period of the production of sacred facts, so it put down all claims of Christian prophecy to public credence. Through the canon it came to be acknowledged that all post-apostolic Christianity is only of a mediate and particular kind, and can therefore never be itself a standard. The Apostles alone possessed the Spirit of God completely and without measure. They only, therefore, are the media of revelation, and by their word alone, which, as emanating from the Spirit, is of equal authority with the word of Christ, all that is Christian must be tested.[103] The Holy Spirit and the Apostles became correlative conceptions (Tertull., de pudic. 21). The Apostles, however, were more and more overshadowed by the New Testament Scriptures; and this was in fact an advance beyond the earlier state of things, for what was known of the Apostles? Accordingly, _as authors of these writings_, they and the Holy Spirit became correlative conceptions. This led to the assumption that the apostolic writings were inspired, that is, in the full and only intelligible sense attached to the word by the ancients.[104] By this assumption the Apostles, viewed as _prophets_, received a significance quite equal to that of Old Testament writers.[105] But, though Irenaeus and Tertullian placed both parties on a level, they preserved a distinction between them by basing the whole authority of the New Testament on its apostolic origin, the concept "apostolic" being much more comprehensive than that of "prophet." These men, being Apostles, that is men chosen by Christ himself and entrusted with the proclamation of the Gospel, have for that reason received the Spirit, and their writings are filled with the Spirit. To the minds of Western Christians the primary feature in the collection is its apostolic authorship.[106] This implies inspiration also, because the Apostles cannot be inferior to the writers of the Old Testament. For that very reason they could, in a much more radical way, rid the new collection of everything that was not apostolic. They even rejected writings which, in their form, plainly claimed the character of inspiration; and this was evidently done because they did not attribute to them the degree of authority which, in their view, only belonged to that which was apostolic.[107] The new canon of Scripture set up by Irenaeus and Tertullian primarily professes to be nothing else than a collection of _apostolic_ writings, which, as such, claim absolute authority.[108] It takes its place beside the apostolic rule of faith; and by this faithfully preserved possession,