It is a most arbitrary proceeding to dissect a passage, quoted by Justin as a consecutive and harmonious whole, and finding parallels more or less approximate to its various phrases scattered up and down distant parts of our Gospels, scarcely one of which is not materially different from the reading of Justin, to assert that he is quoting these Gospels freely from memory, altering, excising, combining, and interweaving texts, and introverting their order, but nevertheless making use of them and not of others. It is perfectly obvious that such an assertion is nothing but the merest assumption. Our Synoptic Gospels themselves condemn {359} it utterly, for precisely similar differences of order and language exist in them and distinguish between them. Not only the language but the order of a quotation must have its due weight, and we have no right to dismember a passage and, discovering fragmentary parallels in various parts of the Gospels, to assert that it is compiled from them and not derived, as it stands, from another source.(1) As an illustration from our Gospels, let us for a moment suppose the "Gospel according to Luke" to have been lost, like the "Gospel according to the Hebrews" and so many others. In the works of one of the Fathers, we discover the following quotation from an unnamed evangelical work: "And he said unto them [--Greek--]: The harvest truly is great but the labourers are few: pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest that he would send forth labourers into his harvest. Go your ways: [--Greek--] behold I send you forth as lambs [--Greek--] in the midst of wolves." Following the system adopted in regard to Justin, apologetic critics would of course maintain that this was a compilation from memory of passages quoted freely from our first Gospel, that is to say Matt. ix. 37. "Then saith he unto his disciples [--Greek--] the harvest," &c, and Matt. x. 16, "Behold I [--Greek--] send you forth as sheep [--Greek--] in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore," &c, which, with the differences which we have indicated, agree. It would probably be in vain 1 For the arguments of apologetic criticism, the reader may be referred to Canon Westcott's work On the Canon, p. 112-- 139. Dr. Westcott does not, of course, deny the fact that Justin's quotations are different from the text of our Gospels, but he accounts for his variations ou grounds which seem to us purely imaginary. It is evident that, so long as there are such variations to be explained away, at least no proof of identity is possible. {360}