The canon of Scripture was decided in accordance with the touchstone of the Pentateuch.
His critical principles are explained in the preface, where he dwells on the necessity of starting as much as possible from trustworthy contemporary sources, or at least from those nearest to antiquity - the touchstone by which verbal traditions can be tested being contemporary poems. He inclines to rationalism, rejecting the marvellous and recasting legends containing it in a more historical spirit; but he makes an exception in the accounts of the introduction of Christianity into Norway and of the national saint St Olaf.
It was necessary, therefore, for Epicurus to go back to nature to find a more enduring and a wider foundation for ethical doctrine, to go back from words to realities, to give up reasonings and get at feelings, to test conceptions and arguments by a final reference to the only touchstone of truth - to sensation.
He wrote, at his best, in the grand manner, melody and thought according with perfection of expression, and his finest poems have that indefinable air of the inevitable which is after all the touchstone of the poetic quality.
A confession which has been the touchstone of orthodoxy for fifteen centuries cannot lightly be ignored or abandoned.
