When it is asked, to whom do we owe the canon? the usual answer is, to the Church. This is true only in a sense. The unity attributed to Christians before Irenæus and Tertullian, consisted in their religious consciousness. It was subjective. The idea of _the church_ was that of inward fellowship—the fellowship of the spirit rather than an outward organism. The preservation of the early Christian writings was owing, in the first instance, to the congregations to whom they were sent, and the neighboring ones with whom such congregations had friendly connection. The care of them devolved on the most influential teachers,—on those who occupied leading positions in the chief cities, or were most interested in apostolic writings as a source of instruction. The Christian books were mostly in the hands of the bishops. In process of time the canon was the care of assemblies or councils. But it had been made before the first general council by a few leading fathers towards the end of the second century in different countries. The formation of a Catholic Church and of a canon was simultaneous. The circumstances in which the collection originated were unfavorable to the authenticity of its materials, for tradition had been busy over them and their authors. Instead of attributing the formation of the canon to the Church, it would be more correct to say that the important stage in it was due to three teachers, each working separately and in his own way, who were intent upon the creation of a Christian society which did not appear in the apostolic age,—a visible organization united in faith,—where the discordant opinions of apostolic and sub-apostolic times should be finally merged. The canon was not the work of the Christian Church so much as of the men who were striving to form that Church, and could not get beyond the mould received by primitive Christian literature. The first mention of a _Catholic Church_ occurs in _The Martyrdom of Polycarp_, an epistle that cannot be dated earlier than 160 A.D., and may perhaps be ten years later. But though the idea is there, its established use is due to Irenæus, Tertullian, and Cyprian. The expression has a different and narrow sense in the seven Ignatian epistles which we believe to be supposititious and later than Justin. Neither the three epistles published in Syriac by Cureton, nor the seven Greek ones enumerated by Eusebius are authentic; though Zahn has tried to prove the latter such, dating them A.D. 144. His arguments, however, are far from convincing; and the whole story of(226) Ignatius’s martyrdom at Rome rather than Antioch is still doubtful; for the circumstances under which he is said to have been dragged to Rome, and his writing letters to the churches by the way, are highly improbable. The testimony of Malalas that Ignatius suffered at Antioch in December, 115, in the presence of Trajan, may be quite as good as that of Chrysostom and the Syriac monthly calendar on which Zahn relies so confidently.