together, we may perhaps assume that Irenaeus
must have been a pupil of Polycarp somewhere between A.D. 135-150. The
mention of the 'royal court' seems at first sight to suggest the hope of
a more precise solution; but even if this notice be taken to imply the
presence of the Emperor for the time being in Asia Minor, our
information respecting the movements of Hadrian and his successors is
too scanty to afford ground for any safe inference [98:1].

Of the later career of Florinus, we are informed that he was at one time
a presbyter of the Roman Church; that he afterwards fell away, and
taught his heresy in the metropolis; that in consequence Irenaeus
addressed to him this letter from which I have given the extract, and
which was also entitled 'On Monarchy' or 'Showing that God is no--the
author of evil' ([Greek: poieten kakon])--this being the special heresy
of Florinus; and that afterwards, apparently by a rebound, he lapsed
into Valentinianism, on which occasion Irenaeus wrote his treatise on
the Ogdoad [98:2]. As the treatise of Irenaeus on the Ogdoad can hardly
have been written later than his extant work on Heresies, in which
Valentinianism is so fully discussed as to render any such partial
treatment superfluous, and which dates from the episcopate of
Eleutherius (A.D. 177-190), we are led to the conclusion that the letter
to Florinus was one of the earliest writings of this Father.

Thus we are left without any means of ascertaining the exact age of
Irenaeus when he sat at the feet of Polycarp. But beyond this
uncertainty his testimony is as explicit as could well be desired. All
experience, if I mistake not, bears out his statement respecting the
vividness of the memory during this period of life. In a recent trial,
the most fatal blot in the evidence was the inability of a pretender to
give any information respecting the games and studies, the companions,
the familiar haunts, of the school and college days of the person with
whom he identified himself. It is the penalty which mature age pays for
clearer ideas and higher powers of generalisation, that the recollection
of facts becomes comparatively blurred. Very often an old man will
relate with perfect distinctness the incidents of his youth and early
manhood, while a haze will rest over much of the intervening period.
Those who have listened to a Sedgwick after a lapse of sixty or seventy
years repeating anecdotes of the 'statesmen' in his native dale, or
des