ing, from the idea, that the Father is incomprehensible to the Son. He tells us, that "the Father Himself, immeasurable though He be, is measured in the Son: for the Son is the measure of the Father, since He (the Son) contains Him."* We cannot forbear adding to these words of S. Irenæus the comment of Petavius upon them; and those who know how candid and how fearless this great theologian is in his criticism of the ante-Nicene fathers will understand our motive in doing so. "There is," he writes, "a majesty and a dignity in these words (of Irenæus), which make them worth a great volume, in favour of the absolute equality between the Father and the Son. For if, though the Father be immeasurable and infinite, still the Son contains and measures Him, the Son must be equal to the Father; He must be infinite and immeasurable like Him; and since there is nothing outside the infinite, nothing whatever can be wanting to Him who is the measure of the infinite."+ It will be seen that Irenæus, in the very statements which he makes on the co-equality of the Father and the Son, implies the distinctness of these two Divine Persons; and evidence might easily be multiplied on this latter point. There is no occasion to dwell upon it, but there is a question obviously suggested by his teaching, so far as we have explained it. How, it may be asked, does he stand with regard to the ordinary phraseology of the Church, according to which the Father made all things through the Word? Every one knows that the Arians perverted this scriptural doctrine into an argument against the full divinity of the Son, that they represented the Son as a natural mediator between God and creatures, standing midway between the one and the other. As a matter of fact, Irenæus speaks repeatedly on this head. He could scarcely have failed to do so. The language of S. Paul and S. John was, of course, familiar to him, and he had to reconcile it with his doctrine that the Word was the Creator, not the instrument of creation. And besides the necessities of the controversy in which he was engaged forced him to speak out, and that for the following reason. The Gnostics, like the Arians, held that intermediate beings were necessary before God could communicate with the world. comprehended; see for example, the fragment of the Knpvyua IIέrpov in Clem. Al. Strom., vi. 5; Hermas, lib. ii. Mandat. 1; and Iren. himself, ii. 30, 9; iv. 19, 2; iv. 20, 5. Iren., iv. 4, 2. Observe that the words are older than S. Irenæus. He introduces them as a quotation. "Bene qui dixit." Petav. de Trin., Præf. 3, 2. Iren., ii. 2, 4. See also, iv. 7, 4. of creatures, and when Irenæus argued that the supreme God was the immediate Creator, they had a plausible reply ready to their hand; they might have retorted that, even on Catholic principles, the supreme God was not the direct and immediate cause of the world, but made all things through the Word. But S. Irenæus knew well how to secure his doctrine against misinterpretation and attack from this side, and how to manifest the consistency of the Catholic doctrine with itself. Again and again he repeats, God was sufficient in Himself for the creation of the world: He did not stand in need of angels or æons, such as the Gnostics invented, before He could reach the material world. On the other hand, he maintains as strenuously the Catholic and scriptural formula, that God made all through His Word. What is the reconciliation between two propositions which might seem at first sight to clash? Simply this. While the Gnostics held that the world was made through the instrumentality of the Demiurge, because he was different in nature from the supreme God, and fitted by virtue of that difference to serve as a link between God and the world, S. Irenæus, on the contrary, maintained that all things were made through or by the Word, precisely because the Word is of the same nature as the Father, and is with Him the one God, by whom the world was made. The words of the saint himself will serve to put the contrast between his doctrine and that of the Gnostics in its true light, and to show that we have not overstated the accuracy with which he defines the relation between the three Persons of the blessed Trinity. "God," he says, "framed and made all things by His Word, standing in no need, either of angels to help Him in His work, or of any power far inferior to Him, and ignorant of the Father, but He in Himself in a manner surpassing all that we can say or think, pre-ordaining all things, made them as He willed. . . All that was made, he made by His Word, who cannot be wearied ";* that is to say, while the Gnostics held that the Father created through the agency of spirits outside of Himself, and so inferior to Him, S. Irenæus believed that He created through the Word, who is not without, but within Him, because He is one God with the Father. He puts the same truth in another form, when in establishing the principle that God, because He has no beginning, therefore needed no external assistance for the work of creation, he anticipates the objection that, after all, even on the Catholic hypothesis, God made the world through the Word, by the statement that the Word *See e.g., Iren., iii. 6, 1. with the Father is the one self-sufficient God.* Again, following the terminology of his time, he describes the Son and the Holy Ghost as "the hands of God, to whom the Father speaks and says, Let us make man to our own image and likeness." The passages we have given already explain the sense in which he calls the Son and the Holy Ghost the hands, not the instruments; for a hand belongs to the nature of man, an instrument is something external and heterogeneous. Lastly, S. Irenæus is so firm in his conviction that the Son and the Holy Ghost are one God with the Father, that he considers it all one to say, God created by Himself, or the Father created through the Son and the Holy Ghost. "He is the Father," we read, "He is God, He it is who created, made, and fashioned things through Himself, that is, through the Word, and through His Wisdom" (i.e. the Holy Ghost). It is difficult to conceive a profession of faith in the one Godhead of the Holy Trinity more clear and more explicit. Besides, we must not forget that the force of the evidence which we have given does not lie in single expressions, however strong, nor again in striking coincidences with the language of later times. Indeed, these coincidences of terminology are wanting altogether, or nearly altogether,§ in Irenæus, and he is as inferior to Tertullian§ in happy anticipation of the terms which the Church afterwards adopted in her definitions, as he is superior in the general tenour and consistency of his teaching on the Godhead of the Son. Indeed, he is superior in this respect, not only to Tertullian, but also to most of the ante-Nicene fathers. And we may attribute this to two causes. First, his close connection with S. Polycarp and other disciples of the Apostles gave him special opportunities of knowing the faith once delivered in its integrity and fulness. Next, falling short as he does, of Tertullian and Origen in gifts of mind and learning, he exhibits that consistent tenacity *Iren., v. 1, 3; and so oɛou Xɛip, v. 5, 2. Iren., ii. 30, 9. Wisdom in Irenæus signifies the Holy Ghost. See iv. 7, 4; and Theoph. ad Autol., ii. 15. There is only one instance which occurs to us of such an anticipation, viz. the words τοῦ θεοῦ λόγου ἑνώσει, τῷ καθ ̓ ὑπόστασιν φυσικῇ, ἑνωθέντος Ty aapki in the 28th of Massuet's Fragments. But Massuet took the supposed fragment of Irenæus from a MS. catena, and it would need a great deal more than the authority of a catena to convince us that it really belongs to a lost work of S. Irenæus. § Compare, for instance, unam substantiam in tribus cohærentibus, and the use of the word "Persona" in Tertull. adv. Prax., 12, and the Substantia remarkable passage, "Videmus duplicem statum, non confusum, sed conjunctum, in una persona, deum et hominem, Jesum ambæ in statu suo quæque, distincte agebant.”—Ib. 27. in preserving the tradition of the faith, which fits a man better than any natural gift to rank as a doctor of the Church. Indeed, we may fitly consider him as, above all others, the doctor of the Church in the ante-Nicene age. And we proceed to make a brief comparison between his teaching and that of the other ante-Nicene fathers on the doctrine, because this is the only reasonable way of testing the value of his doctrinal statements and the greatness of his position. To some extent, indeed, we have done so already, but it has been by the way, for up to this point we have been occupied chiefly in drawing out his own doctrine on the Trinity, and contrasting it with that of his heretical opponents. Now that we have finished this part of our task, we may dismiss the subject of the Gnostics for a little, and try to measure S. Irenæus directly and immediately by the standard of the other fathers who lived before the Nicene Council. The method which we shall follow is a very simple one, and it is better fitted perhaps than any other for enabling us to form an accurate judgment. We propose to examine his position with regard to two cardinal difficulties, which were the fruitful sources of error and confusion on the doctrine of the Trinity within the ante-Nicene Church. Of these the former concerns the Eternal Word in His relation to creatures. It was the general doctrine of the fathers down to S. Augustine, that whenever we read in the Old Testament of God appearing to the patriarchs or prophets, we must attribute the apparition, not to God the Father, nor to the Three Persons in common, but to God the Son. "Even then, even from the beginning," in the beautiful words of Tertullian, the Son "was learning to be man."* S. Irenæus fully accepts this premise, or, as we ought rather to say, he takes it for granted. It is one of his favourite arguments for the unity of the two Testaments that the same God who was incarnate of the Blessed Virgin had appeared long before to the patriarchs, had conversed with Abraham and Moses, and "assuming from the first the likeness of His creatures," had revealed the Father to them.† So far Irenæus is at one with the rest of the early fathers. The contrast between him and many among them, however, begins the moment we turn from this opinion on the apparition of God the Word, to the consequences which were deduced from it. We should expect *Adv. Marc., ii. 27. + Iren., iv. 6, 7 ; iv. 9, 1; iv. 10, 1; Frag. 23. As to the doctrine of the fathers generally on this point, see a note in the Oxford translation of Tertullian, Præscr. 13. to find a theory of this sort perverted and abused. It was natural that even those who believed, (as all the fathers believed, and must have believed, from the mere fact that they were Catholics,) in the Divinity of the Son, should be led into doubtful or erroneous language by the evident contrast between the Father, "whom no man has seen or can see," and the Son, who appeared again and again to the chosen people. It was natural that they should fall into some inconsistency and speak without seeing all that their language involved, as if God the Son was inferior and subordinate to God the Father. They had, too, a further and stronger inducement to place the Son, even before His incarnation, in subordination to the Father, from the fact that in doing so they were able to recommend the Christian faith to Jews of the Alexandrian school, or again to heathens seeking after the truth, and inclined to accept the Church's creed if it could be put in philosophical form. This is what we should expect a priori, and the facts of history abundantly confirm the expectation. Justin, for instance, in his Dialogue with the Jew Trypho, reminds him of the divine apparitions mentioned in the Pentateuch. He begins by distinguishing between "the God who was seen by Abraham" and the God who ever "remains above the heavens and has been seen by no man." Then, returning to the same subject, he tries to convince his opponent that "this God, who, as the Scriptures say, appeared to Abraham, Jacob, and Moses, is different from the God who made all," or, to quote another of his expressions, "a God under the Maker of the Universe," and he supports his thesis by the argument that "the Maker and Father of all" could not have "left the region above the sky, and have appeared in a little corner of the earth." Tertullian makes the same distinction between the visible God, and he gives explicitly the reason for the visibility of the Son which Justin implies. "He who was seen," he writes in his book against Praxeas, "must be different (from Him who was not seen). For we cannot define Him who was seen as invisible, and we come to the conclusion that we must understand the Father to be invisible, as beseems the fulness of His Majesty, and recognize a Son visible, according to the measure of His derivation" (from the Father).§ Novatian and Origen, as Petavius shows, committed themselves to the same erroneous language, and thus supplied the Semi-Arians with an argument against the co-equal Majesty of the Son,an argument of which they did not fail to take advantage.|| * Justin, Dial., c. 56. § Adv. Prax., 14. ↑ Justin, Dial., ib. + Ib., 60. |