But what books contain this revelation? Pursuing the subject, the council defined anew the canon of Scripture, which the state of the times made, if not necessary, at least very opportune. Protestant critics have not ceased since the Reformation to attack the canon sanctioned by the authority of the church. Rationalism has come to the support of Protestant criticism, and sometimes flatters itself it has, by its historical discoveries, blotted out the entire list of the holy books. The unadulterated traditions preserved by the church have no scientific value in the eyes of rationalism, which only admits the canonicity of those books that can trace the proofs of their origin back to the very time of the apostles. Tertullian took a wrong stand in asserting that the dogmas of faith should have prescriptive proof. In vain the Catholic points out the wholly exceptional circumstances that surround the Scriptural canon—the impossibility from the very first of admitting books of doubtful origin as coming from the apostles, or that these books could have been changed in any respect under the jealous guardianship of a church and hierarchy spread over the face of the earth, and charged with the conservation of the sacred deposit. The incredulous critic refuses to receive proofs which the most common mind perceives the full value of as well as the good sense. What does he substitute for them? Theories founded on mere conjecture, and constantly changing, but which are welcomed as the final conclusions of science. Have we not seen the school of Tübingen found on some obscure words of Papias a whole system tending to establish the more recent composition of the Gospels? These new doctors regard the books of divine truth as some of those legends that are embellished as they pass from mouth to mouth till they are collected in a definite form by some unknown writer. And has not this strange theory met with ardent panegyrists in France, as if it were the definite solution of the great controversy on the origin of the Gospels?[60] Whoever attentively examines these strange theories will soon perceive their weak point. But where are the men in the present generation who read with sufficient care to see the hollowness of such solutions? Their authors have seats in our academies; they occupy the most important professorships; there is not an honorary distinction that does not add its recommendation to their apparent knowledge. Skilled in praising one another, the journals and reviews regarded as authorities, even by certain Catholics, extol their labors. One would think they had a monopoly of science. Has not all this been a source of real danger to the faith of Christians?