to see Christ and to hear his
voice."[619] Those redeemed by Jesus are immediately joined by him into
a unity, into the true humanity, the Church, whose head he himself
is.[620] This Church is the communion of the Sons of God, who have
attained to a contemplation of him and have been gifted with everlasting
life. In this the work of Christ the God-man is fulfilled.

In Tertullian and Hippolytus, as the result of New Testament exegesis,
we again find the same aspects of Christ's work as in Irenaeus, only with
them the mystical form of redemption recedes into the background.[621]

Nevertheless the _eschatology_ as set forth by Irenaeus in the fifth Book
by no means corresponds to this conception of the work of Christ as a
restoring and completing one; it rather appears as a remnant of
antiquity directly opposed to the speculative interpretation of
redemption, but protected by the _regula fidei_, the New Testament,
especially Revelation, and the material hopes of the great majority of
Christians. But it would be a great mistake to assume that Irenaeus
merely repeated the hopes of an earthly kingdom just because he still
found them in tradition, and because they were completely rejected by
the Gnostics and guaranteed by the _regula_ and the New Testament.[622]
The truth rather is that he as well as Melito, Hippolytus, Tertullian,
Lactantius, Commodian, and Victorinus lived in these hopes no less than
did Papias, the Asia Minor Presbyters and Justin.[623] But this is the
clearest proof that all these theologians were but half-hearted in their
theology, which was forced upon them, in defence of the traditional
faith, by the historical situation in which they found themselves. The
Christ, who will shortly come to overcome Antichrist, overthrow the
Roman empire, establish in Jerusalem a kingdom of glory, and feed
believers with the fat of a miraculously fruitful earth, is in fact a
quite different being from the Christ who, as the incarnate God, has
already virtually accomplished his work of imparting perfect knowledge
and filling mankind with divine life and incorruptibility. The fact that
the old Catholic Fathers have both Christs shows more clearly than any
other the middle position that they occupy between the acutely
hellenised Christianity of the theologians, i.e., the Gnostics, and the
old tradition of the Church. We have indeed seen that the twofold
conception of Christ and his work dates back to the time of the
Apostl