tury, nor was it consistently
carried out by any one teacher. The two conceptions opposed to it, that
of the early Christian eschatology and the rationalistic one, were still
in vogue. The two latter were closely connected in the third century,
especially in the West, whilst the mystic and realistic view was almost
completely lacking there. In this respect Tertullian adopted but little
from Irenaeus. Hippolytus also lagged behind him. Teachers like
Commodian, Arnobius, and Lactantius, however, wrote as if there had been
no Gnostic movement at all, and as if no Antignostic Church theology
existed. The immediate result of the work carried on by Irenaeus and the
Antignostic teachers in the Church consisted in the fixing of tradition
and in the intelligent treatment of individual doctrines, which
gradually became established. The most important will be set forth in
what follows. On the most vital point, the introduction of the
philosophical Christology into the Church's rule of faith, see Chapter
7.

The manner in which Irenaeus undertook his great task of expounding and
defending orthodox Christianity in opposition to the Gnostic form was
already a prediction of the future. The oldest Christian motives and
hopes; the letter of both Testaments, including even Pauline thoughts;
moralistic and philosophical elements, the result of the Apologists'
labours; and realistic and mystical features balance each other in his
treatment. He glides over from the one to the other; limits the one by
the other; plays off Scripture against reason, tradition against the
obscurity of the Scriptures; and combats fantastic speculation by an
appeal sometimes to reason, sometimes to the limits of human knowledge.
Behind all this and dominating everything, we find his firm belief in
the bestowal of divine incorruptibility on believers through the work of
the God-man. This eclectic method did not arise from shrewd calculation.
It was equally the result of a rare capacity for appropriating the
feelings and ideas of others, combined with the conservative instincts
that guided the great teacher, and the consequence of a happy blindness
to the gulf which lay between the Christian tradition and the world of
ideas prevailing at that time. Still unconscious of the greatest
problem, Irenaeus with inward sincerity sketched out that future dogmatic
method according to which the theology compiled by an eclectic process
is to be nothing else than the simple fai