"The natural and spiritual miracles of the sacred narrative are only the notes of a higher harmony which resound throughout the discords of earthly history. To our dull sense indeed they may seem disconnected, but the more we listen the more we perceive a connected law of higher euphony, now presaging, and finally bringing about the solution of all dissonance into an eternal harmony. Surely then a believer may look down with pity upon the spirit of the age and its declaration, that the harmony of the Kosmos is destroyed by the miracles of the Bible." (Beyschlag.) The "Shepherd of Hermas" is next alluded to, but as it is not pretended that it contains any quotation from, or reference to, any passage of the Old or New Testament, it is simply a negative witness in this case. It is found in the Codex Sinaiticus, after the Epistle of Barnabas. The following is Mosheim's description of the work: "The book entitled the 'Shepherd of Hermas' (so called because an angel is the leading character in the drama) was composed in the second century, by Hermas, the brother of Pius, the Roman bishop. The writer, if he was indeed sane, deemed it proper to forge dialogues held with God and angels, in order to insinuate what he regarded as salutary truths more effectually into the minds of his readers. But his celestial spirits talk more insipidly than our scavengers and porters." What a contrast between the writings of the New Testament and those left out of the canon does such a book as this "Shepherd of Hermas" exhibit! Bunsen thus alludes to it: "That good but dull novel which Niebuhr used to say he pitied the Athenian Christians for being obliged to hear read in their meetings." "From the very dawn of Catholic literature, beginning with 'Hermas the Shepherd,' it had been the object of the Christian writers to render the Greek and Roman mind, by degrees, independent of the heathen philosophers, and to create a Catholic literature and library, more particularly for the use of children and catechumens."[30] [30] "Hippolytus and his Age," vol. i., 315. Failing to distinguish between what was intended to be true, what was meant to be fiction, and what was fraudulently spurious, theologians have often been misled, and important doctrines have been thereby perverted. CHAPTER III. _THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS--CONTINUED._ _"I cannot dispense with miracles as historical explanations of certain indubitable historical facts. I do not find that they make rents in history, but by their aid alone am I able to get over its gaping chasms."_ _Rothe._ CHAPTER III. _THE SYNOPTIC GOSPELS--CONTINUED._ THE EPISTLES OF IGNATIUS--THE EPISTLE OF POLYCARP--JUSTIN MARTYR--HEGESIPPUS--PAPIAS--THE CLEMENTINES--THE EPISTLE TO DIOGNETUS.