'The Lord being asked when His kingdom should come, said, "When two shall be one, and that which is without as that which is within, and the male with the female neither male nor female."' It is needless to say how remote are such expressions as these from any which have come down to us through the evangelists; but they were no inventions of Clement. The passage reappears later in Clement of Alexandria, who found it in something which he called the Gospel of the Egyptians. It will be urged that because Clement quoted other authorities beside the evangelists, it does not follow that he did not know and quote from them. If the citation of a passage which appears in almost the same words in another book is not to be accepted as a proof of an acquaintance with that book, we make it impossible, it may be said, to prove from quotations at all the fact of any book's existence. But this is not the case. If a Father, in relating an event which is told variously in the Synoptical Gospels, had followed one of them minutely in its verbal peculiarities, it would go far to prove that he was acquainted with that one; if the same thing was observed in all his quotations, the proof would amount to demonstration. If he agreed minutely in one place with one Gospel, minutely in a second with another, minutely in a third with another, there would be reason to believe that he was acquainted with them all; but when he merely relates what they also relate in language which approaches theirs and yet differs from it, as they also resemble yet differ from one another, we do not escape from the circle of uncertainty, and we conclude either that the early Fathers made quotations with a looseness irreconcileable with the idea that the language of the Gospels possessed any verbal sacredness to them, or that there were in their times other narratives of our Lord's life standing in the same relation to the three Gospels as St. Matthew stands to St. Mark and St. Luke. Thus the problem returns upon us; and it might almost seem as if the explanation was laid purposely beyond our reach. We are driven back upon internal criticism; and we have to ask again what account is to be given of that element common to the Synoptical Gospels, common also to those other Gospels of which we find traces so distinct--those verbal resemblances, too close to be the effect of accident--those differences which forbid the supposition that the evangelists copied one another. So many are those common passages, that if all which is peculiar to each evangelist by himself were dropped, if those words and those actions only were retained which either all three or two at least share together, the figure of our Lord from His baptism to His ascension would remain with scarcely impaired majesty.