Our author himself shows that these precepts cannot be mere floating tradition. He says such "seems impossible" (vol. i. p. 226). They are evidently the words of Jesus taken from a written source, but he contends that they are not a quotation from the Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospels as we have them, but _from some other Gospel_ which is not extant. He says: "When the great difference is considered between the parallel passages in Matthew and Luke, and still more between these and the passage in Mark, it is easy to understand that that other Gospel may have contained a version differing as much from them as they do from each other." I remark, supposing that Clement had before him all three versions, which differ from each other, what is more natural than that he should give the sense without adhering to the exact words of any. Only an inquirer who has a bias against Christianity would think of disputing the quotation. If Epiphanius "clearly wrote without having the Gospel of Luke before him," as our author states on page 100, and if Tertullian "evidently quotes that Gospel from memory," as he also says on the same page; why should it be assumed as a matter of course that Clement had the writings before him? He also may have quoted from memory. There is something strangely marvellous about the disappearance of these imaginary lost records of the Sermon on the Mount. We know that in the year A.D. 139 Justin Martyr wrote that the "Memoirs of the Apostles," called "Evangels" (gospels), were read after the prophets every Lord's Day in the assembly of the Christians. Where were they then? Were they identical with these memoirs called Gospels? Where were they about the year A.D. 180, when Irenæus proves that four Gospels were held in the highest esteem, and were read in all the Churches; alluding to them as the four columns of the Church, and comparing them to the four quarters of the world, the four principal winds, and the four figures of the Cherubim? Where were they when he says: "So well established _are our Gospels_, that even teachers of error themselves bear testimony to them: even they rest their objections on the foundations of the Gospels"?[22] This hypothesis of our author is certainly going out of the way to find the reason for a thing. It is to be remembered that what is evidenced by Irenæus, who wrote about A.D. 180, and was the pupil of Polycarp, is highly important. Dr. Mosheim says his five books against heresies, the only writings of his extant, are a splendid monument of antiquity.[23] From the evidence of Irenæus, it is clear that the four Gospels must have been occupying a special and authoritative place in the Church some time before the time he wrote his five books on heresies, about the year 180. Tischendorf, who knows as much as any man about the Scripture manuscripts, says: "It is a well-established fact that, already between A.D. 150 and 200, not only were the Gospels translated