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conjlant Practice of Mankind is with this Rule,and if it fails here, all the World has hithertoproceeded wrong in Judgmetits of this Kind. Not 'that our present Case requires us to reject the Te- |stimony of later Writers: For if we descend from . Ithe Spring Head and examine the more distant jStreams of Tradition, we shall find them run 'pretty much in the same Channel. The Preju-dices of particular Times, and the Circumjlancesof certain Writers give some little Interruption tothe Current-, but ‘Truth and the Reason of the‘Thing, still prevailed to keep the Course open andfree to our own Times.

The first Opposition that is supposed to havebeen made to the Genuineness and Canonical Au-thority of the Revelations, was that of Caius, aPrelbyter of Rome , An. 210. Certain is is fromEufebius, His. Eccl. I. 3. c. 28. that he chargedCerinthus with having forged a Revelation, aswritten by a great Apostle: But whether this wasmeant of the Apocalypse, as we now have it, orof some Forgery in Imitation of it, will be consi-dered hereafter.

Forty or fifty Years after this, Dionysus Alexan-drine, another Catholick Writer, in a Disputewith Nepos, a rigid Millenarian , owns the divineAuthority of the Revelations ; but earnestly con-tends that it was not written by John the Aposle:

He ascribes it to John a Presbyter of Ephesus ,and Contemporary with the Apostle.

Ecclesiastical History supplies us with no otherNames of Men, that opposed the Tradition ofJohn the Apostle’s having wrote the Revelations,in the third Centurv: Whilst for the Affirm al roe

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