Books, recall a time when degrees of value were still felt, and all parts of the Bible did not stand on the same footing, and were not taken equally. There was a time when books were read as part of the Bible which are in no Bible now; there was a time when books which are in every Bible now, were by many disallowed as genuine parts of the Bible. St. Athanasius rejected the Book of Esther, and the Greek Christianity of the East repelled the Apocalypse, and the Latin Christianity of the West repelled the Epistle to the Hebrews. And a true critical sense of relative value lay at the bottom of all these rejections. No one rejected Isaiah or the Epistle to the Romans. The books rejected were such books as those which we now print as the Apocrypha, or as the Book of Esther, or the Epistle to the Hebrews, or the so-called Epistle of Jude, or the so-called Second Epistle of St. Peter, or the two short Epistles following the main Epistle attributed to St. John, or the Apocalypse.
Now, whatever value one may assign to these works, no sound critic would rate their intrinsic worth as high as that of the great undisputed books of the Bible. And so far from their finally getting where they now are after a thorough trial of their claims, and with indisputable propriety, they got placed there by the force of circumstances, by chance or by routine, rather than on their merits. Indeed, by merit alone the Book of Esther could have no right at all to be now in our Canon while Ecclesiasticus is not, nor the Epistle of Jude and the Second Epistle of Peter rather than the First Epistle of Clement. But the whole discussion died out, not because the matter was sifted and settled and
