the seven short letters must be given up as spurious; and the remaining three, which are addressed respectively to Polycarp, to the Ephesians, and to the Romans, and which are found in the Syriac version, are much shorter even than the short epistles which had already appeared under the same designations. The Epistle to Polycarp, the shortest of the seven letters in preceding editions, is here presented in a still more abbreviated form; the Epistle to the Romans wants fully the one-third of its previous matter; and the Epistle to the Ephesians has lost nearly three-fourths of its contents. Nor is this all. In the Syriac version a large fragment of one of the four recently rejected letters reappears; as the new edition of the Epistle to the Romans contains two entire paragraphs to be found in the discarded letter to the Trallians. It is only due to Dr Cureton to acknowledge that his publications have thrown immense light on this tedious and keenly agitated controversy. But, unquestionably, he has not exhausted the discussion. Instead of abruptly adopting the conclusion that the three letters of the Syriac version are to be received as genuine, we conceive he would have argued more logically had he inferred that they reveal one of the earliest forms of a gross imposture. We are persuaded that the epistles he has edited, as well as all the others previously published, are fictitious; and we shall endeavour to demonstrate, in the sequel of this chapter, that the external evidence in their favour is most unsatisfactory.