There were venerable men of fourscore and ten at that Council; if these books had been first introduced in their lifetime, they must have known it.

There were men there whose parents had heard the Scriptures read in church from their childhood, and so could not be imposed upon with a new Bible.
The New Testament could not be less than three generations old, else one or other of the disputants would have exposed the novelty of its introduction, from his own information.

The Council of Nice, then, did not make the New Testament.

It was a book well known, ancient, and of undoubted authority among all Christians, ages before that Council.

_The existence of the New Testament Scriptures, then, ages before the Council of Nice, is a great fact._ We next take up the assertions, propounded with a show of learning, that the books of the New Testament, and especially the Gospels, were not in use, and were not known till the third century; that they are not the productions of contemporary writers; that the alleged ocular testimony or proximity in point of time of the sacred historians to the events recorded is mere assumption, originating in the titles which Biblical books bear in our canon; that we stand here (in the gospel history), upon purely mythical and poetical ground; and that the Gospels and Epistles are a gradually formed collection of myths, having little or no historic reality.