THE PRESS AS A RELIGIOUS AGENCY 345 



to which branch Christ and his apostles without exception belonged. 

 The constant use of them by the Pharisees, and the familiarity with 

 them of the Sadducees, are obvious from the reference to Timothy: 

 " And that from a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, 

 which are able to make thee wise unto salvation through faith 

 which is in Christ Jesus. All scripture is given by inspiration of 

 God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for 

 instruction in righteousness." So long as Christianity did not 

 spread so rapidly and widely as to render intercourse with author- 

 ized teachers impossible, and so long as those recognized as teachers 

 taught the same things, there was small need for manuscripts; 

 but this was the situation only for a brief period. Converts 

 were made faster than they could be educated orally; standards 

 were required; letters, dignified at the present day as " epistles," 

 were sent hither and thither, being read in the assemblies and 

 passed from one to another, and a sure inference from the apostolic 

 writings is that they speedily began to be a main reliance. The 

 number of manuscripts continually increased. They were highly 

 valued, and copies of them were multiplied. 



Religion, even under the most adverse circumstances, possesses 

 more possibilities for perpetuating the documents essential to it 

 than does mere literature. Incidentally Disraeli, in his Curiosities 

 of Literature, made this clear. In the section devoted to " Lost 

 Books" he recounts that Manetho's History of Egypt and the His- 

 tory of the Chaldeans by Berosus are wholly lost. Of the History 

 of Polybius, which once contained forty books, only five remain. 

 Of the historical library of Diodorus Siculus only fifteen books 

 remain out of forty. Half of the Roman Antiquities of Dionysius of 

 Halicarnassus have perished. Of the eighty books of the History 

 of Dion Cassius only twenty-five remain. Livy's history consisted 

 of one hundred and forty books; we possess only thirty-five. Of 

 the eighty books of Tacitus little more than four remain. Two 

 precious works of ancient biography are gone: Varro's Life of 

 Seven Hundred Romans, and Acts of the Great Men among the 

 Romans, composed by Atticus, the friend of Cicero. " We have 

 only a few fragments of Menander, a poet who would have enter- 

 tained us more than Homer. ^Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides 

 each wrote about one hundred dramas, of which there remain only 

 seven each of ^Eschylus and Sophocles, and nineteen of Euripides. 

 Of the one hundred and thirty comedies of Plautus there are but 

 twenty, and these are imperfect. Pliny the Elder wrote a history 

 in twenty volumes, which has wholly perished." 



Since the five books of the Pentateuch were arranged in their 

 present form more than 2500 years have elapsed. The latest in 

 the Old Testament canon, the Book of Malachi, has existed for 



