presented to the Emperor Antoninus. The latter, convinced of the young convert's sincerity, put a stop to the cruel persecutions which were then going on against the Christians. The Emperor Marcus Aurelius also received a copy of the "Apology" from St. Justin. In this well-known work the Saint states that "the Gospels, together with the writings of the prophets, are publicly read in the assemblies of the Christians."[1] He also affirms that they were written in part by the Apostles themselves and partly by their disciples. This was shortly after the year 138, when men were still alive who had conversed with St. Paul, and who could well remember the sweet admonitions of brotherly love given by the aged St. John, who tells us that he had seen with his own eyes the things which he writes.[2] The chain of apostolic writers from St. Peter to St. Augustine, i.e., from the first century to the fourth or fifth, bears witness that this wonderful book was used in every Christian community from the regions of the Jordan, whence St. Justin came, to the confines of Spain, where Isidore of Cordova wrote his commentaries; from the northernmost part of Dalmatia, where Titus had preached the doctrine delivered him by St. Paul, to the limit of the African desert, whence one of the oldest Latin versions of the Scriptures was brought to St. Ambrose.

It is interesting to be able to cite the testimony of pagan as well as of Jewish writers concerning the great events which the Christian Gospels record. We have the historic fact of Christ's person and work attested in the "Annals" of Tacitus, the greatest of Roman historians,[3] who was consul of Rome in 97. His statements are corroborated by Suetonius, secretary to the Emperor Adrian, by Pliny, the Viceroy of Bithynia and friend of the Emperor Trajan, by the Jewish writers Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Christ, and the historian Flavius Josephus, and by the rabbis who collated the traditions of the Talmud. All these, whilst they wrote but briefly of the subject, bear indirect witness to the belief and to the practice by the earliest Christians of the Gospel precepts, although the books of the New Testament had not at that time been formed into a definite canon. Thus the unbroken evidence of the existence of the Christian Scriptures goes back to the very time of their first composition.

We come to the Old Testament. That the Jews in the time of Christ possessed a collection of sacred books is recorded on every page of the New Testament, of whose authentic source there can be no reasonable doubt. There are altogether about two hundred and seventy passages in the New Testament books which are quotations from the Old Testament. There are innumerable references in the Gospels and Epistles, and in the early Christian writers, to the sacred law of the Jews, among whom the first converts were made; for these converts continued to use the Mosaic writings and the prophetical books. Christ Himself had beautifully illustrated this practice, from the first, in His teaching. "He came to Nazareth," St. Luke tells us, "where He was brought up; and He went into the synagogue, according to His custom, on the sabbath day; and He rose up to read. And the Book of Isaias the Prophet was delivered unto Him. And as He unfolded the book He found the place where it was written: The spirit of the Lord is upon me, wherefore He hath anointed me; to preach the gospel to the poor He hath sent me; to heal the contrite of heart. To preach deliverance to the captives, and sight to the blind; to set at liberty them that are bruised; to preach the acceptable year of the Lord, and the day of reward. And when He had folded the book He restored it to the minister and sat down. And the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He began to say to them: This day is fulfilled this Scripture in your ears. And all gave testimony to Him."[4]

Any attempt to corrupt the Old Testament writings, or to change and destroy them, even in part, became impossible after the Gospels had been written. It would at once have aroused marked attention among both Jews and Christians, who with equal reverence regarded the Book as the sacred and inviolable word of God, however mutually hostile their feelings were regarding the interpretation of its meaning. For if ever there existed a document whose authority was sanctioned and whose preservation was guaranteed by the severest laws and most minute precautions, it was the code of sacred writings known to the Jews as the "Law and the Prophets." It was read in every synagogue on the sabbath and festival days. Every Jew above the age of twelve was obliged to repeat certain parts of the Sacred Book each day, morning and night. Thrice dispersed among the Gentile nations, north, west, and south, the Jews carried with them the book of the Law and the Prophets, and we find them repeat its sweet words of hope and trust in Jehovah by the rivers of Babylon as under the glimmer of the torchlights in the caverns of Samaria or rocky Arabia. Their faces were forever turning towards Jerusalem. Nay, when the language of their fathers had ceased to be spoken during generations of enforced exile, the children still repeated the Hebrew words of the Law in the temple, even though they had versions made for the people by rabbis who were under sacred vow not to change an iota of the Lord's written word. We have in the present Hebrew Bibles some remnant of the traditional care with which the Jew guarded the letter of the Law, whatever might be the spirit in which he interpreted it. In order that the Sacred Text might never be tampered with, even by the addition or omission of a single letter or word, the scribes were obliged to count the verses, words, and characters of each book. They knew by heart every peculiarity of grammatical or phonetic expression. Thus the young rabbi must verify that the Book of Genesis contains 1,534 verses; that the exact middle of the book, counting every letter from the beginning and from the end, occurs in chapter xxvii. 40. He knew that there were ten verses in the Scriptures beginning and ending with the letter נ (nun) (as in Lev. xiii. 9); two in which every word ends with the letter ם (mem). The letter ע (ayin), in Ps. lxxx. 14, is the exact middle of the Psalter. The letter א (aleph) occurs 42,377 times, ב (beth) 38,218 times, ג (ghimel) 29,537 times, and so of every letter in the alphabet. These, and a thousand other peculiarities which made the corruption of the Hebrew text an almost absolute impossibility, were in later ages collected into a glossary called the Masorah, which forms a sort of separate commentary to the Bible. If you open the Hebrew volume of the Old Testament, just as it is printed to-day, you will find many of these warnings inserted in the very text. Thus at the end of the Book of Chronicles we have this sentence: "The printer is not at fault, for the sum total of verses in the whole Book of Chronicles is 1650." Then, lest the reader might forget this number, a verse is attached which contains the letters representing the same number. The verse, which is taken from the I. Samuel vi. 13, reads: "They saw the ark and rejoiced in seeing it." Just as the words "MeDiCaL VIrtue" might stand in English for the same number.

Many other peculiarities in the manner of copying the Hebrew