From hence we may infer, that the Scriptures of the Old Testament, which we have at this day, were not canonical nor a law unto the Jews, till the renovation of their covenant with God at their return from the captivity, and restoration of their commonwealth under Esdras. But from that time forward they were accounted the law of the Jews, and for such translated into Greek by seventy elders of Judea, and put into the library of Ptolemy at Alexandria, and approved for the word of God. Now seeing Esdras was the high-priest, and the high-priest was their civil sovereign, it is manifest that the Scriptures were never made laws, but by the sovereign civil power. [Sidenote: The New Testament began to be canonical under Christian sovereigns.] By the writings of the fathers that lived in the time before that the Christian religion was received, and authorized by Constantine the emperor, we may find, that the books we now have of the New Testament were held by the Christians of that time, except a few, (in respect of whose paucity the rest were called the Catholic Church, and others heretics), for the dictates of the Holy Ghost, and consequently for the canon or rule of faith: such was the reverence and opinion they had of their teachers; as generally the reverence, that the disciples bear to their first masters in all manner of doctrine they receive from them, is not small. Therefore there is no doubt, but when St. Paul wrote to the Churches he had converted; or any other apostle or disciple of Christ, to those which had then embraced Christ; they received those their writings for the true Christian doctrine. But in that time, when not the power and authority of the teacher, but the faith of the hearer, caused them to receive it, it was not the apostles that made their own writings canonical, but every convert made them so to himself.