Dr. Mosheim, writing on behalf of Christianity, says that the Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians is by some treated as genuine and by others as spurious, and that it is no easy matter to decide. Many critics, of no mean order, class it amongst the apostolic Christian forgeries, but whether the Epistle be genuine or spurious, it contains no quotation from, it makes no reference to, the Gospel of John. To what is said of Irenæus, Tertullian, and Clement of Alexandria, it is enough to note that all these are after a.d. 150. Irenæus may be put 177 to 200, Tertullian about 193, and Clement of Alexandria as commencing the third century. One of Dr. Tischendorf's most audacious flourishes is that (p. 49) with reference to the Canon of Muratori, which we are told "enumerates the books of the New Testament which, from the first, were considered canonical and sacred," and which "was written a little after the age of Pius I, about a.d; 170." First the anonymous fragment contains books which were never accepted as canonical; next, it is quite impossible to say when or by whom it was written or what was its original language. Muratori, who discovered the fragment in 1740, conjectured that it was written about the end of the second or beginning of the third century, but it is noteworthy that neither Eusebius nor any other of the ecclesiastical advocates of the third, fourth, or fifth centuries, ever refers to it. It may be the compilation of any monk at any date prior to 1740, and is utterly valueless as evidence.