They affirm that the Scriptures are full, that they are a perfect rule, that they contain all things necessary to salvation; and from hence they confuted all heresies.
Yes, the heretics were so confuted, I grant; because these would not acknowledge any other authority but that of the Scriptures, and these too forged or corrupted by themselves; but by the Scriptures that remained unaltered the early Fathers of the Church both demonstrated the omissions and interpolations of the heretical canons and the false doctrines of the heresy itself. But so far from following the same rule to the members of the true Church, they made the applicability of this way of proof the criterion of a heretic.
Ib.
p. 394.
'Which truly they then preached, but afterwards by the will of God delivered to us in the Scriptures, which was to be the pillar and ground to our faith.'
Lessing has shown this to be a false and even ungrammatical rendering of Irenæus's words. The
columen et fundamentum fidei
, are the Creed, or economy of salvation.
Ib.
vii. p. 395. Extracts from Clement's