the fourth and fifth books 'must,' as he confidently asserts, have
been written some years after the third, it follows by parity of
reasoning, that the first and second must have been written some years
before it. Yet, with a strange inconsistency, he assumes in the very
same sentence that the two first books cannot have been written till the
latest years of Eleutherus, because on his showing the third must date
from that epoch [261:1].

With the respective dates of the several books however we need not
concern ourselves; for they all exhibit the same phenomena, so far as
regards the attitude of the author towards the Canonical writings of the
New Testament. On this point, it is sufficient to say that the authority
which Irenaeus attributes to the four Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles,
the Epistles of St Paul, several of the Catholic Epistles, and the
Apocalypse, falls short in no respect of the estimate of the Church
Catholic in the fourth or the ninth or the nineteenth century. He treats
them as on a level with the Canonical books of the Old Testament; he
cites them as Scripture in the same way; he attributes them to the
respective authors whose names they bear; he regards them as writings
handed down in the several Churches from the beginning; he fills his
pages with quotations from them; he has not only a very thorough
knowledge of their contents himself, but he assumes an acquaintance with
and a recognition of them in his readers [262:1].

In the third book especially he undertakes to refute the opinions of his
Valentinian opponents directly from the Scriptures. This leads him to be
still more explicit. He relates briefly the circumstances under which
our Four Gospels were written. He points out that the writings of the
Evangelists arose directly from the oral Gospel of the Apostles. He
shows that the traditional teaching of the Apostles has been preserved
by a direct succession of elders which in the principal Churches can be
traced man by man, and he asserts that this teaching accords entirely
with the Evangelical and Apostolic writings. He maintains on the other
hand, that the doctrine of the heretics was of comparatively recent
growth. He assumes throughout, not only that our four Canonical Gospels
alone were acknowledged in the Church in his own time, but that this had
been so from the beginning. His Valentinian antagonists indeed accepted
these same Gospels, paying especial deference to the Fourth Evangelis