3. When a great man dies, we have usually a collection of the letters he received in his lifetime, but not of those he himself wrote, and to collect these last is frequently a matter of considerable difficulty. We have therefore reason to congratulate ourselves that we have, within the covers of the New Testament, epistles of Paul addressed to the most diverse regions—to Macedonia (1 and 2 Thess., Philippians), to Achaia (1 and 2 Corinthians), to Asia Minor (Ephesians, Colossians, Galatians), and to Italy (Romans), not to speak of the so-called Pastoral or private Epistles—epistles, moreover, the dates of which extend over a period of at least eight years.[281] It is, of course, evident that the appearance of an epistle in this collection is not in itself a guarantee of Pauline authorship. But on the other hand, the collection must have been made at a very early date, because we find, almost without exception, not only the same number of Pauline epistles, but also the same order of their arrangement. There is scarcely any evidence of the circulation of a particular epistle by itself. True, the order now usually adopted, which has been the prevailing order from the fourth century onwards and which seems, for the most part, to arrange the epistles according to their length (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, and so on), is not the original. In the Muratorian Canon (so called from its discoverer), which is a very old catalogue of the books of the Bible, the Epistles to the Corinthians stand at the head of the collection and that to the Romans at the end. Tertullian had the same arrangement, while Marcion, for dogmatic reasons apparently, put Galatians first, then 1 and 2 Corinthians, Romans. The present condition of our Epistle to the Romans is also supposed to point to its former position at the end of Paul’s epistles to the churches. In that epistle the concluding doxology is found at different places, while many look upon chap. xvi. 1-23 as a separate document, originally intended for Ephesus, which was attached to the entire collection at the end. Among other varieties of arrangement it may be mentioned that Colossians frequently followed 2 Thessalonians. When and where the first collection took its rise, and by whom the second arrangement was introduced, can no longer be determined with certainty. Zahn thinks the first originated at Corinth about the year 85, his reason being that it seems to be presupposed in the Epistle to the Corinthians written by Clement of Rome about the year 95. The second he would date from Alexandria, between 220 and 260. If we might suppose that all our extant manuscripts are derived, not from separate copies of the Epistles, but from a copy of the earliest collection, it would serve to explain how it comes that certain corruptions have found their way into the text of all our manuscripts—_e.g._ in Colossians ii. 18. On the other hand, the variations at the end of Romans, _e.g._, are