volume with the apocryphal, that it was not manifest by any mark of public censure which of them should be preferred to the other. We have at this day, certain authentic writings of ecclesiastical authors of those times, as Clemens Romanus, Barnabas, Hermas, Ignatius, and Polycarp, who wrote in the same order wherein I have named them, and after all the other writers of the New Testament, except Jude, and the two Johns. But in Hermas you shall not meet with one passage, or any mention of the New Testament; nor in all the rest is any one of the evangelists called by his own name. And if sometimes they cite any passages like those we read in our gospels; yet, you will find them so much changed, and for the most part so interpolated, that it cannot be known, whether they produced them out of ours, or some apocryphal gospels; nay, they sometimes cite passages which it is most certain are not in the present gospels. From hence, therefore, it is evident that no difference was yet put between the apocryphal and canonical books of the New Testament, especially if it be considered, that they pass no censure on the apocryphal, nor leave any mark whereby the reader might discern whether they attributed less authority to the spurious than to the genuine gospels; from whence it may reasonably be suspected, that if they cite sometimes any passages conformable to ours, it was not done through any certain design, as if dubious things were to be confirmed only by the canonical books, so as it is very possible that both those and the like passages may have been borrowed from other gospels besides these we now have. But what need I mention books that are not canonical, when indeed it does not appear from those of our canonical books which were last written, that the church knew any thing of the gospels, or that the clergy made a common use of them. The writers of these times do not chequer their works with texts of the New Testament, which yet is the custom of the moderns, and was also theirs in such books as they acknowledge for scripture; for they most frequently cite the books of the Old Testament, and would, doubtless, have done so by those of the New, if they had then been received as canonical."