n the
ecclesiastical _regula_ literally interpreted; and the attempts of
Irenaeus to extract an authoritative religious meaning from the literal
sense of Church tradition and of New Testament passages must be regarded
as conservative efforts of the most valuable kind. No doubt Irenaeus and
his theological _confreres_ did not themselves find in Christianity that
freedom which is its highest aim; but on the other hand they preserved
and rescued valuable material for succeeding times. If some day trust in
the methods of religious philosophy vanishes, men will revert to
history, which will still be recognisable in the preserved tradition, as
prized by Irenaeus and the rest, whereas it will have almost perished in
the artificial interpretations due to the speculations of religious
philosophers.

The importance that the Alexandrian school was to attain in the history
of dogma is not associated with Clement, but with his disciple
Origen.[676] This was not because Clement was more heterodox than
Origen, for that is not the case, so far as the Stromateis is concerned
at least;[677] but because the latter exerted an incomparably greater
influence than the former; and, with an energy perhaps unexampled in the
history of the Church, already mapped out all the provinces of theology
by his own unaided efforts. Another reason is that Clement did not
possess the Church tradition in its fixed Catholic forms as Origen did
(see above, chapter 2), and, as his Stromateis shows, he was as yet
incapable of forming a theological system. What he offers is portions of
a theological Christian dogmatic and speculative ethic. These indeed are
no fragments in so far as they are all produced according to a definite
method and have the same object in view, but they still want unity. On
the other hand Origen succeeded in forming a complete system inasmuch as
he not only had a Catholic tradition of fixed limits and definite type
to fall back upon as a basis; but was also enabled by the previous
efforts of Clement to furnish a methodical treatment of this
tradition.[678] Now a sharp eye indeed perceives that Origen personally
no longer possessed such a complete and bold religious theory of the
world as Clement did, for he was already more tightly fettered by the
Church tradition, some details of which here and there led him into
compromises that remind us of Irenaeus; but it was in connection with his
work that the development of the following period too