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 side of the Catholic ideal of the church is not yet developed in the writings of Irenaeus. On the contrary, he insists on the original Christian conception of the universal priesthood and outpouring of the Spirit on all believers (iv. 20, 6 sqq.; v. 6, 1; cf. iv. 13, 2 sqq.; 33, 1 sqq.), first, as against the Gnostics, and their claims to an exclusive possession of the divine πνεῦμα, and, secondly, against the false prophets, and their denial of the presence of the Spirit in the church (iii. 11, 9; iv. 33, 6). The sacramental idea of grace imparted through the church is for Irenaeus restricted to baptism as a divine institution for the salvation of man, the type of which is the ark of Noah (iv. 36, 4). Of priestly absolution and its sacramental significance he nowhere speaks; on the contrary, he adopts the saying of an elder which has a somewhat Montanistic ring about it—that after baptism there is no further forgiveness of sins (iv. 27, 2). This, as is clear from the epistle of the Gallican confessors, is not meant to exclude the possibility of indulgence being extended to the fallen under any circumstances. The familiar thought of the Ignatian epistles, that separation from the episcopal altar is a separation from the church herself, also finds no distinct utterance in the writings of Irenaeus. But in his time the ministration of the Eucharist by bishops and presbyters was undoubtedly a long-established custom. In regard to the dogma of the Holy Communion Irenaeus, like Justin Martyr, expresses the thought that through the invocation of Christ's name over the earthly elements the Divine Logos does actually enter into such mysterious connexion with the bread and wine as to constitute a union of an earthly and a heavenly πρᾶγμα similar to that which took place at the Incarnation itself. In virtue of this union of the Logos with the bread and wine those earthly substances are made the flesh and blood of Christ; and it appears to have been with Irenaeus a favourite thought, that through the partaking of Christ's flesh and blood in the Holy Communion our earthly bodies are made partakers of immortality (iv. 18, 4 seq.; 33, 2; v. 2, 2 seq.; cf. also iv. 17, 5 seq.; 18, 1 sqq., and the second Pfaffian fragment, Fr. Graec. xxxvi. ap. Harvey).

The chief significance of Irenaeus as a theologian consists in his doctrine concerning the Person and Work of Christ. The doctrine of Christ's Godhead was for the Gentile Christianity of the post-apostolic age the theological expression of the absolute significance of that divine revelation which was enshrined in His person and work. While the Gnostics regarded Christ as only one among numerous eradiations of the divine essence, thereby imperilling on the one hand the truth of the divine monarchia, and on the other the absolute and final character of the gospel revelation, the opposing doctrine of the Godhead of the Logos, and of His Incarnation in Jesus Christ, provided the exact theological truth and formula of which the Christian conscience felt the need, in order to gather into one the scattered elements which the multitude of Gnostic Aeons were dividing. Following the guidance of St. John's gospel, the more philosophically cultured teachers of the church—Justin, Theophilus, Tatian, Athenagoras, the Alexandrine Clemens, Origen, Tertullian, and Hippolytus—found in the doctrine of the Divine Logos the classical expression which they needed for the unique and absolute character of the gospel revelations. It was in antithesis both to the Gnostic doctrine of Aeons and the psilanthropism of the Ebionites that the Divine Logos or Eternal Thought of God Himself was conceived of as the personal organ of all divine revelation Which had issued from the inner life of the Divine Paternity. His manifestation in the flesh is therefore the climax of all the revelations of God in the world. This Logos-doctrine Irenaeus adopted. The invisible Father is visible in the Logos (iv. 20, 7). The divine "Pleroma" (Irenaeus borrows the Gnostic term to express the fulness of divine perfection, ii. 1, 3 seq.) is revealed therein. God Himself is all Intelligence, all Thought, all Logos; what He thinks He utters, what He utters He thinks; the all-embracing divine intelligence is the Father Himself, Who has made Himself visible in the Son (ii. 28, 5). The infinite, immeasurable Father is, in the words of some old teacher of the church, become measurable and comprehensible in the Son ("immensus Pater in Filio mensuratus"), for the Son is the "measure of the Father," the manifestation of the Infinite in finite form (iv. 4, 2). In contrast with Tertullian, Irenaeus's first great purpose and object is to emphasize the absoluteness and spirituality of God, and therefore to reject anything like a physical emanation (prolatio) of the Logos, lest God should be made into something composite, and something other than His own infinite thought (principalis mens), or His own Logos (ii. 28, 5). The older teachers of the Logos-doctrine conceived the generation of the Logos after the analogy of the temporal process from thinking to speaking, and assumed that His issuing from the Father as a distinct person, i.e. the outspeaking of the inward divine thought, first took place at the creation. Tertullian represented the same conception in a more sensuous form. The Father is for him the whole Godhead, the Son "portio totius"; and on this point he expressly recognizes the resemblance between his view and that of the Gnostics (c. Drax. 8). Irenaeus, on the other hand, is driven by his own opposition to the Gnostic doctrine of Aeons to reject anything like a προβολή or prolatio from the Godhead as a limitation of His infinity or an anthropomorphism. He is therefore the first doctor of the church who maintained with the utmost distinctness the eternal coexistence of the Son with the Father ("semper coexistens Filius Patri," ii. 30, 9; iii. 18, 1). His frequent designation of the Son and Holy Spirit as the "Hands of God" is a figurative expression to denote Their being not so much emanations of the Godhead as organs of its creative energy. To presumptuous endeavours to comprehend the way in which the Son comes from the Father he opposes our human ignorance, and mocks at the vain attempts of those who would transfer human relations to the Infinite and Unchangeable One ("quasi ipsi obstetricaverint prolationem enunciant," ii. 28, 6). These polemics, if directed primarily against the