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Paley, William, 1743-1805

"Evidence of Christianity"

viii. p. 99.) and then, speaking of some other writings
bearing the name of Peter, "We know," he says, "that they have not been
delivered down to us in the number of Catholic writings, forasmuch as no
ecclesiastical writer of the ancients, or of our times, has made use of
testimonies out of them." "But in the progress of this history," the
author proceeds, "we shall make it our business to show, together with
the successions from the apostles, what ecclesiastical writers, in every
age, have used such writings as these which are contradicted, and what
they have said with regard to the Scriptures received in the New
Testament, and acknowledged by all, and with regard to those which are
not such." (Lardner, vol. viii. p. 111)
After this it is reasonable to believe that when Eusebius states the
four Gospels, and the Acts of the Apostles, as uncontradicted,
uncontested, and acknowledged by all; and when he places them in
opposition, not only to those which were spurious, in our sense of that
term, but to those which were controverted, and even to those which were
well known and approved by many, yet doubted of by some; he represents
not only the sense of his own age, but the result of the evidence which
the writings of prior ages, from the apostles' time to his own, had
furnished to his inquiries.


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