Church attempted to engraft their own inventions upon the revelation of God's will. And much indeed it were to be wished that the argument here adduced against the completeness of Scripture, as a rule of faith, had been confined to the school now mentioned, and that far holier and better men had not been from time to time led away by it, to set up the uncertain, and (as painful experience has shown) the dangerous standard of tradition as a concurrent and equally obligatory authority by its side. But on this subject, I shall have more to urge by and by. At present let me proceed by concluding my extract from Irenæus. In reply, then, to the abovequoted appeal of his opponents from the sure and tangible test of the written Gospel, to their own traditions, or, in other words, to their own gratuitous additions to revelation, the good Father proceeds to urge, that even with respect to tradition, the orthodox Church can again confidently meet them on their own ground, and plead against their arbitrary assumptions, the sound traditions derived by the

Church directly from the Apostles themselves, which will be found in all points to harmonize and coincide with the written word.

Such was the decided preference of Scripture to Tradition, or rather it might appear more correct to say, the almost exclusive adoption of the former as a revelation of God's will, displayed by this early Christian writer. In fact, so entirely does this good and singleminded man appear to have considered the written word as complete in itself, that he proceeds, in a subsequent passage, to argue with more honest simplicity than soundness of sense, or accuracy of logic, that according to the nature of things, and the physical structure of the universe, exactly four Gospels', neither more nor less, were to be expected. We

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1" Neque enim plura numero quam hæc sunt, neque rursus pauciora capit esse Evangelia. Quoniam enim quatuor regiones mundi sunt in quo sumus, et quatuor principales spiritus, et disseminata est Ecclesia super omnem terram, columna autem et firmamentum Ecclesiæ est Evangelium, et spiritus vitæ ; consequens est quatuor habere eam columnas, undique flantes incorruptibilitatem, et vivificantes homines," &c.— Adversus Hæres. lib. 3. cap. 11.

may smile at the weakness of the argument, but it leaves us no room to doubt that he considered that portion of revelation, as at all events incapable of further addition. It should be added, that in his frequent quotations from other portions of the Books of the New Testament, his appeal appears always to be made in a spirit of complete and implicit deference to what he had been taught to consider conclusive as an infallible rule of faith.

But Irenæus does not stand alone in this view of the case. Take the Apostolical Fathers from their very earliest commencement, and I have no hesitation in asserting that written Scripture, and not oral Tradition, will be found to have supplied the whole subject matter of their doctrinal teaching. Begin in the first place with the oldest of the uninspired Christian writers, Clemens Romanus. It is well known that the epistle which was transmitted from Rome, in his name, was addressed to the members of the Church of Corinth, in consequence of certain disputes, and a spirit of insubordination which had grown up in that

community, and which Clemens, as an influential personage in the Christian commonwealth, was called upon to appease. Now, then, what are the principles and doctrines contained in the first of his two letters, which is the one respecting the authenticity of which no doubt has ever existed? They are simply these. He exhorts the Corinthian Church to mutual Christian love, and submission to legitimate authority, by those natural arguments of sound sense and piety, which any other good man in his situation might have been expected to use. He reminds them more especially of their former turbulence under the paternal rule of the apostle Paul, and strongly enforces his arguments on the side of peace, by large extracts from his writings; particularly from the Epistle to the Hebrews; and also by sundry quotations from the Old Testament. But from first to last through the whole of this truly Christian exhortation there occurs not one single word, implying any groundwork whatever for authoritative inculcation of doctrine, beyond the limits of in

spired Scripture. No allusion, direct or incidental, is to be found to any one element of Christian faith still floating in a state of mere oral teaching, and not yet secured and rendered at once permanent and free from misapprehension, by being committed carefully to writing. We meet here not the slightest symptom of that spirit which prevailed in later times, of withholding from the multitude what were assumed to be the esoteric doctrines of our faith, which, under the name of the "disciplina arcani," considered the breasts of the priesthood, and not the universally accessible page of revelation, the authorized storehouse of divine knowledge. He wrote like St. Paul, and not the less so, because he added nothing to what Paul had already taught; and with one or two trifling exceptions, which merely show that his pen was not guided by infallible inspiration, his writings would not, perhaps, be unworthy of that Apostle.

The Epistle of Polycarp to the Philippians, which comes next in order of time among the works of the primitive Fathers, is