known as creating some noise in the world. Certainly the language used in describing them is not very complimentary. They may have referred to the Essenes, who had their ideal Chrest. A modern writer has shown that the story of the persecution of Christians by the emperor Nero (a. d. 54-68) is a modern fabrication. Robert Taylor, in his _Diegesis_ published in 1829, proved that Cornelius Tacitus never could have written the passage describing such persecution. It has been demonstrated that the whole of the so-called _Annals of Tacitus_, containing the celebrated passage, was forged by a Papal secretary named Poggio Bracciolini. In 1422, while in the receipt of a small salary under Martin V., he was tempted by an offer of five hundred sequins (which would now be equal to fifty thousand dollars) to engage in some mysterious literary work. Seven years later, six books of what are now called the _Annals of Tacitus_ were brought to him by a monk from Saxony. Then all Christendom rejoiced to learn that the heathen Tacitus had mentioned Christ crucified under Pontius Pilate. Poggio, though a father both spiritually and carnally, was not a husband till the age of fifty-four. At seventy-two he accepted the office of secretary to the republic of Florence, and at seventy-nine he died, leaving five sons of his old age. Up to the last he was a busy student and writer. Fifty-six years after his death his fourth son was secretary to Pope Leo X., at which time the pope’s steward, stimulated by a munificent reward, discovered the first six incomplete books of the _Annals_, being the unfinished work of Poggio in his old age. The finding of ancient MSS. was a very lucrative business for scholars in those days. It began with Petrarch, who died in 1374, and did not end with Poggio, who died in 1459. Poggio discovered several orations of Cicero, a history by Ammianus Marcollinus, and several other classic works, besides the unclassic writings of Tertullian, the first Latin Father. The modern fabrication of many of the ancient Latin and Greek MSS. is now becoming apparent. Jean Hardouin, a French Jesuit, died in 1729, aged eighty-three years. He was deeply versed in history, language, and numismatology. At the age of forty-four he began to suspect that certain writings of the Christian Fathers were spurious, and soon became convinced that none of them were genuine. Then turning his attention to the Greek and Latin classics, he found evidence sufficient to convince him that most of those also were forgeries, being fabricated by the Benedictine monks after the middle of the fourteenth century. Eusebius’s _Ecclesiastical History_, first found in Latin in the fifteenth century and then in Greek in the six-teenth century, we have no doubt is a probable forgery. And if so we have really no history of the primitive Church except what may be found in the New Testament and a few uncertain fragments of apocryphal literature, all much corrupted.