became quite master of the situation; it was obliged to accommodate
itself to it.[7] The work first began with the scientific treatment of
individual articles contained in the rule of faith, partly with the view
of disproving Gnostic conceptions, partly for the purpose of satisfying
the Church's own needs. The framework in which these articles were
placed virtually continued to be the apologetic theology, for this
maintained a doctrine of God and the world, which seemed to correspond
to the earliest tradition as much as it ran counter to the Gnostic
theses. (Melito), Irenaeus, Tertullian and Hippolytus, aided more or less
by tradition on the one hand and by philosophy on the other, opposed to
the Gnostic dogmas about Christianity the articles of the baptismal
confession interpreted as a rule of faith, these articles being
developed into doctrines. Here they undoubtedly learned very much from
the Gnostics and Marcion. If we define ecclesiastical dogmas as
propositions handed down in the creed of the Church, shown to exist in
the Holy Scriptures of both Testaments, and rationally reproduced and
formulated, then the men we have just mentioned were the first to set up
dogmas[8]--dogmas but no system of dogmatics. As yet the difficulty of
the problem was by no means perceived by these men either. Their
peculiar capacity for sympathising with and understanding the
traditional and the old still left them in a happy blindness. So far as
they had a theology they supposed it to be nothing more than the
explanation of the faith of the Christian multitude (yet Tertullian
already noted the difference in one point, certainly a very
characteristic one, viz., the Logos doctrine). They still lived in the
belief that the Christianity which filled their minds required no
scientific remodelling in order to be an expression of the highest
knowledge, and that it was in all respects identical with the
Christianity which even the most uncultivated could grasp. That this was
an illusion is proved by many considerations, but most convincingly by
the fact that Tertullian and Hippolytus had the main share in
introducing into the doctrine of faith a philosophically formulated
dogma, viz., that the Son of God is the Logos, and in having it made the
_articulus constitutivus ecclesiae_. The effects of this undertaking can
never be too highly estimated, for the Logos doctrine is Greek
philosophy _in nuce_, though primitive Christian views may have been