do the names of the Roman Christians whom he salutes tell, as we have seen, the same tale; but this inheritance of Greek language was passed on through several generations of Roman Christians. That they should use it in communicating with the Churches of the East would not indeed be surprising. We might have expected that Pope Clement would write in Greek to the Corinthians at the end of the first century, though perhaps scarcely that Pope Cornelius should write to Fabius of Antioch, or Pope Dionysius to his namesake of Alexandria, in the same language after the middle of the third. But it was just the same with the Roman Christians at home among themselves. Hermas wrote out his revelations for the benefit of the local Church-it was to be Clement's business to communicate them to foreign Churches-and he wrote them in Greck. Fifty or a hundred years later still Hippolytus, the first great Roman writer and theologian, was composing treatise after treatise, exegetical, historical, polemical, but one and all in Greek. The earliest of the long series of the Latin writers of Christian Rome was Novatian, consecrated Antipope in A.D. 251, whose De Trinitate and De Judaicis Cibis are the first extant contributions of the Roman Church to ecclesiastical Latin. Very similar is the evidence of Roman Christian nomenclature. Hermas and Hippolytus are both Greek names. Of the ten second-century Popes, eight bear Greek names (Euarestus, Alexander, Xystus, Telesphorus, Hyginus, Anicetus, Soter, Eleutherus), and two only, Pius and Victor, Latin. In the third century they are nearly as possible equally divided. Yet gravestones even of third century Popes with Latin names are found inscribed with Greek characters, such as AOTKIOC. In all probability the first half of the third century was the time of the transition, though Greek might still continue to be in use in some few traditional connexions. There is some ground for supposing that Hippolytus, who was properly Bishop of Portus, the harbour of Rome, but was certainly intimately mixed up with the ecclesiastical affairs of the capital itself, may have stood in some episcopal relation with the foreign Greek-speaking Christians who still thronged Rome at a time when the Roman Church itself was rapidly becoming Latinized.' Substantially the same phenomena reveal themselves in 1 Photius, Cod. 48, says that Gaius, the author of the Labyrinth, was related to have been under Popes Victor and Zephyrinus-c. A.D. 190215—ἐθνῶν ἐπίσκοπος. Now the real author of the Labyrinth was not Gaius, who is elsewhere always called a presbyter, but Hippolytus, who was certainly a bishop. the history of other Western Churches. The first Christian communities in Gaul were colonies from the Churches of Asia Minor, and not only brought the Greek language with them, but found it already firmly established in the valley of the Rhone. The Epistle which the brethren of Lyons and Vienne sent to the mother Churches in Asia and Phrygia was naturally in Greek. In the same language Irenæus of Lyons wrote his great work Against Heresies, which was meant to appeal to the culture of the whole Christian world. In the preface to it he apologizes for the deterioration of his Greek style, which he attributes to the amount he had had to talk, not of Latin as we might have guessed, but of Celtic. We have less means in the case of the Churches of this district, than in the case of Rome, of estimating at what date Greek finally yielded to Latin. But at least in the district round the mouth of the Rhone, the traces of the original state of things are very curious, for we are told that the Psalms still continued to be sung in Greek at Arles in the fifth and sixth centuries. And if the common view is correct, that the bilingual Codex Bezæ of the Gospels and Acts was in Gaul from the time it was written in the sixth century till the time when it comes to light in Central France in the sixteenth, a knowledge of Greek must have survived in some parts till the tenth century, the date of the latest corrector of its Greek text. The Church of Africa seems to have been founded at a later date than the Churches of the Rhone, and at a much later date of course than the Church of Rome. But, on the other hand, it was bilingual and even predominantly Latin from the first. Its two earliest recorded Acts of martyrdom -the Acts of the Scillitan martyrs in A.D. 180, and the Acts of Perpetua and her companions at Carthage in A.D. 202circulated in contemporary and parallel forms of Greek and Latin, though in both cases the Latin is obviously the true original. Tertullian wrote some of his treatises in both languages, one at least in Greck only; but Tertullian, however bilingual, was essentially a Latin writer. Before the time of Cyprian, the African Church, probably first of all the important Churches of the West, had become exclusively a Latin Church. Thus between the years 150 and 250 A.D. the Western Churches were slowly making the passage from the one language to the other; and the indispensable companions of their journey were the sacred books of their religion. It is no part of our subject to discuss or decide the vexed question whether all the forms of the Latin New Testament, as they meet us in the third and fourth centuries, were or were not variations from a common stock. Suffice it to say that the Canonical books, though they, or most of them, were doubtless the first, can scarcely have been the only ones, to be translated. The edges of the Canon were not yet sharply defined. Some at least of the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, the Epistle of Barnabas, the Shepherd of Hermas, were scarcely distinguished from what were later on ranked exclusively as the writings of the Apostles. In any case, books which had proved themselves serviceable to the Christian communities in their original Greek dress, whether Canonical or not, would prove themselves not less serviceable if translated for the benefit of Christians who spoke only Latin. In some few cases the names and dates of the translators are recorded for us. We know that Jerome and Rufinus at the end of the fourth century rendered many of Origen's works into Latin,and that Rufinus did the same for the pseudo-Clementine Recognitions, and for the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, and Jerome for the latter's Chronicle. But of the time and place of the earliest translators, to whom we owe the Latin versions of Barnabas and Hermas, of Clement and Irenæus, no vestige of direct evidence is preserved; what knowledge we can reach must be pieced together by slow and circuitous processes. In the case of the other Apostolic Fathers, of Ignatius, of Polycarp, and of Papias,' the evidence is insufficient to connect the versions with the early centuries of our era. The great work of Irenæus (though strictly of course he is not to be classed with the Apostolic Fathers at all) is known to us completely only in the Latin; as early as the end of the sixth century Pope Gregory the Great could not find any copy of the Greek original in Rome. A handful of manuscripts-the earliest and best is the Claromontanus, lately at Cheltenham, now at Berlin-all of them probably written in Gaul, contain a Latin version, barbarously literal, but not therefore the less valuable. Tertullian's treatise against the Valentinians has indisputably drawn upon the description of the same heretics in Irenæus' first book; and since the time of the Benedictine editor, Massuet, it has been generally admitted that the coincidences in Tertullian extend not simply to the subject 1 The Oracles of Papias must have been at some time translated, for a medieval catalogue of the Chapter Library at Nîmes-destroyed by the Huguenots in the sixteenth century-contains among the Biblical books the notices librum Papie; librum de verbis Domini. matter, but to the actual language of the Latin version, which would then become contemporary, or almost contemporary, with Irenæus' own lifetime. Dr. Hort, however, in our own day, has relied on the character of the Biblical text employed in the translation as betraying the fourth century rather than the second or third, and the question is still sub judice. But there is no reason to doubt that the fatherland of the translator was Gaul. The Latin version of the Epistle of Barnabas is contained in a unique tenth-century MS., originally of Corbie in Picardy, thence taken with so many other treasures of the Benedictine houses to the Benedictine centre of St. Germaindes-Prés at Paris, and from Paris during the storms of the Revolution to St. Petersburg. It was used by the first editor, Menard, and has now been accurately edited by Hilgenfeld, and by Gebhardt and Harnack. This manuscript is absolutely the only proof, save the occurrence of the name of the Epistle in the Biblical list of the Codex Claromontanus of St. Paul, that Barnabas was known to the West; we have therefore nothing but the internal character of the version itself to direct us, and here the only point that we can adduce -we do not know that it has been noticed before-is that the Old Testament quotations (there are none of course from the New) present at intervals marked coincidences with the 'African version used by St. Cyprian.1 ( The Shepherd of Hermas exists in Latin dress in two distinct but related versions. Of these the 'vulgate' is preserved in a large group of manuscripts, and was printed as long ago as 1513, from which time down to the present century it was the only form in which Hermas was known : while the Palatine,' so called from the Palatine codex at the Vatican (sæc. xiv.) which contains it, was discovered by Dressel, and is now most accessible in Gebhardt and Harnack's edition. The relative priority of the two versions is in dispute, but there is no reason to doubt the high age of both. The more interesting text is that of the Palatine version; and Haussleiter has devoted a pamphlet to proving that this was the earlier of the two, and of African origin, while the other and later is of Italian or Roman provenance. But scholars are only as yet on the threshold of these inquiries, and immediate results are not to be anticipated. Over hasty hypotheses and premature generalizations will not help in the end: it is to the accumulation of new material 'The strongest instance is the quotation from Isaiah (lviii. 6-10) in Barnabas iii. 3. like our Latin Clement, and to the patient questioning and cross-questioning of the whole body of witnesses, singly and together, that we must look for real advance. An English scholar cannot bring to a close his contribution to the criticism of the new discovery without the expression of a profound regret that the learned world has been deprived of the opportunity of seeing this and other problems, in the solution of which the Latin version of St. Clement would assist, treated by the sober wisdom and exhaustive knowledge of Bishop Lightfoot of Durham. ART. XI.-THE LONDON SCHOOL BOARD ELECTION. School Board Chronicle. (London, 1893, 1894.) THE religious question in its relation to Board schools is one about which we have recently heard a good deal, and about which we cannot doubt that we shall hear much more in the near future. It has been the prominent theme at the London School Board for some time, and it promises to be the controversial topic on which the election to that body in November will turn; and what affects London to-day is tolerably certain to affect the whole country to-morrow. It may be well, therefore, for us to examine the way in which the present controversy has arisen. When Mr. Forster introduced his Education Bill in 1870, there were two distinctly marked parties in the field. On the one side were those who had done all that had been done for elementary education in this country, and who represented the definitely religious aspect of the question. Their idea was that no education worthy of the name could be given that was not based upon religion. For this object they had made great sacrifices of time and money and long before the State had stirred, or politicians thought it worth their while to move in the matter, they had erected and maintained schools wherever they had property responsibilities or an opening was accorded them. Churchmen naturally formed the greater portion of this party as they had done the most for popular education, and their schools far exceeded in number those of all other religious bodies. Opposed to them was the Birmingham Education League, whose watchwords. were, Education--free, compulsory, secular. Its members had |