He thinks that the knowledge of God was kept up amongst the patriarchs by tradition from Adam, and amongst the Jews by the prophets; whilst in heathen nations the tradition has been lost, and men are left to find it out by reason(274): that human governments were providentially ordained to restrain the ferocity and rapacity of mankind after they had given up the fear of God(275); that the law of Moses was given by way of discipline, to recover the Israelites back to that sense of justice, and responsibility, and feeling of love to God and man which they had lost(276); that the prophets were inspired in order to accustom man by degrees to bear God’s Spirit and to have communion with him(277): and thus in various ways God prepared mankind for salvation, providing for them laws suited to their various states of preparation. In opposing the notions of the Gnostics, Irenæus had to defend the position that the Old Testament is not contrary to the New; that they both emanated from the same God acting differently under different circumstances. The abolition of the law, he contended, was no proof of a change of mind, but only of a change of circumstances; the law being in its nature symbolical and preparatory, when the Gospel, the reality and the end, was revealed, the office of the law ceased(278). He distinguishes, however, between what he calls the _natural_ portions of the law and the rest. As _they_ were kept by good men before the law(279), so he conceives them to be binding on us ever since(280). It is not at first sight clear what he means by that term, but he expressly informs us that he comprises in it the whole decalogue(281). And yet there is every appearance that he would exclude the fourth commandment, which he expressly asserts not to have been observed before the giving of the law(282). But although the precepts of the moral law are equally _binding_ at all times, he thought that they were not formally _given_ to the just men of old, because they observed them voluntarily, being a law unto themselves(283). But when God’s people forgot them in the land of Egypt, then it became necessary distinctly to enact them, to prepare man for the fuller duties of love to God and goodwill to man(284). And when they did not obey the moral law, he added to it the ceremonial(285), that, by types, their servile and childish natures might be trained up to the apprehension of realities; by temporal things, of eternal; by carnal, of spiritual; by earthly, of heavenly(286). Some of their ordinances had a twofold use; as circumcision was intended, equally with their rites and ceremonies, to keep them distinct from the heathen, and also to signify the circumcision of the soul(287).