We now come to a more remarkable period of his life. We have seen that the Christians of that age looked with peculiar anxiety to Rome, as the Church where, from the constant meeting together of Christians from the provinces, the traditions of the catholic Church were most accurately preserved. Any departure of that Church from purity of doctrine would be of more serious consequence than the deflexion of one of less influence. Irenæus had been taught to exercise this feeling by his mission from the martyrs; and had no doubt learnt to feel it more deeply on the spot, when he trode the ground consecrated by the martyrdom of the two great apostles with whose joint superintendence and instruction that Church was so long favoured, and when he observed how every heretic likewise resorted to Rome, as a more important theatre than any other. Nor can we suppose that he had left that Church without forming some bond of union with individual members of it. His heart, therefore, returned no doubt to it, and caused him to indite those several epistles Eusebius mentions(49), occasioned by the dissensions he heard of as prevailing there. The first mentioned by the historian is that addressed to Blastus on the subject of _schism_. What it was which led him into schism is variously related by ancient writers. Eusebius simply says(50) that he indulged in speculations of his own at variance with truth. Theodoret(51) stated that he was entangled in the errors of Marcion and Valentinus; but if he had been so at that time, it appears most probable that Irenæus would have noticed the errors themselves even more prominently than the schism which accompanied them. A more probable account is that given by the ancient author whose addition to one of Tertullian’s works is commonly printed with it(52), that “he wished covertly to introduce Judaism;” and in particular, that “he insisted on the observance of the paschal season on the fourteenth day of the moon, according to the law of Moses;” with which agrees what Pacian says(53), “that he was a Greek, and that he adhered to the Montanists;” for the Montanists, having arisen in Asia Minor, celebrated that season at the same time as the other Christians of that country, i. e. with the Jews. So that his schism probably consisted in this, that having come from Asia, he wished to raise a party favourable to the Asiatic practice, or, at least, declined to conform to that of Rome. And we can imagine how earnestly Irenæus would press him to conform to the usages of the Church in which he sojourned; a thing he could do with so much greater authority, inasmuch as, being himself of Asiatic birth, and brought up in the very church of Polycarp, he had conformed to the Western usage.