This Testament had a profound influence over those states, which, as well as the Athenians, were kept in reverential awe by its divine authority; and Paul having acquired a knowledge of this in his vagrancies,* shows his dexterity by availing himself of it in his 2nd Epistle to the Corinthians iii., 6, wherein he says, "God hath made us able ministers of the (New) Testament, not of the letter, but of the spirit" Now, we defy all our divines and commentators put together, to show that the present New Testament of the Christians was _then_ in existence, that is to say, before the end of the first century, and it is on all hands agreed by church chronologists, that Paul wrote before that period; and, therefore, in writing the above epistle, it was not possible that he could be speaking in reference to any other book than that which the Greeks called "_the unspeakably holy Testament_." How was it possible for him to speak of a book which we can prove was not compiled into its present form until centuries had elapsed after his time--viz., until the councils of Nice and Laodicea? That this book existed not in all the first century we have the authority of the most learned and orthodox God-well,** who, in his dissertation upon Irenæus, confesses as follows:--"We have at this day certain most authentic ecclesiastical writers of the times, as Clemens, Romanus, Barnabas, Hermas, Ignatius, and Polycarp, who wrote in the same order in which I have named them, and after all the writers of the New Testament. But in Hermas you will not find one passage, or any mention of the New Testament, nor in all the rest is any one of the evangelists named." What! our four evangelists entirely unknown to all the five apostolic fathers! Could this have been possible if these gospels had been written when these "authentic" writers lived? * When Tonstal, Bishop of Durham, burnt the New Testament, declaring it to be doctrinam peregrinam, he probably meant that it was-only the doctrine of Paul the rambler.--Vide Tyndale. ** Dodwell says that it "was not until the reign of Trajan or Adrian that a collection of the books of the New Testament was publicly made, the priests having previous to that time concealed them in the archives, of their churches." It was then that they made anything that suited them the "word of God."