4. The Romish Clergy are wont to tell us, that their scheme of concurrent Unwritten Tradition is recognised and enjoined even by Scripture: because St. Paul speaks of a brother, walking disorderly, and not after the TRADITION received from himself by the Thessalonians; {33b} because the same St. Paul exhorts the same Thessalonians to stand fast and hold the TRADITIONS which they had been taught whether by word or by his epistle; {33c} and because still the same St. Paul praises the Corinthians, for remembering him in all things, and for keeping the TRADITIONS as he delivered to them. {33d} Respecting this vain plea, which can only mislead the ignorant and the incautious, we readily answer in manner following. (1.) St. Paul must not be interpreted, so as to contradict both his Lord and himself. (2.) The Romish Clergy cannot prove, that _all_ the Traditions, mentioned by the Apostle, were _unwritten_: for _some_ are distinctly specified as taught by a _written_ epistle; and the simple word _Tradition_ itself, which merely denotes _any thing handed down or delivered or communicated_, has no necessary reference to what is _unwritten_ rather than to what is _written_. (3.) It is not known by the Romish Clergy: whether the _originally_ oral unwritten traditions, mentioned by St. Paul, were not _finally_ committed to durable writing in documents, composed _subsequently_ to those epistles in which he mentions them, and _afterward_ added to the sacred canon; so that, what were _once_ unwritten traditions, became _ultimately_ a portion of our present written word: for the plain reader may be usefully taught or reminded, that several portions of the New Testament were written at a _later_ period than the epistles in which St. Paul speaks of Traditions. (4.) Whensoever the Romish Clergy shall _prove_ the unwritten traditions of their Church to have been received from Christ and his apostles with as much certainty, as the Thessalonians and Corinthians _knew_ what they had personally received from the mouth of St. Paul: we will cheerfully attend to them with all due reverence. (5.) Both on the principle of our Lord’s own censure of the rabbinical traditions, and likewise on the principle of plain common sense, we cannot embrace oral traditions purporting to be God’s unwritten word; when they are _palpably irreconcileable with_, and _grossly contradictory to_, God’s own acknowledged written word. III. We may now, in the way of historical testimony, go on profitably to hear the ancient Fathers: those identical old orthodox Fathers to wit; whom, in respect to the present question, the doctors of the Council of Trent, as the reader may peradventure recollect, claim as being clearly and indisputably quite their own. 1. Let us first attend to Irenèus in the second century.