The danger must have been pressing and great indeed, if we are to judge it to have been proportioned with the opprobrious epithets and vituperation heaped upon Marcion by the “Great African,” that Patristic Cerberus, whom we find ever barking at the door of the Irenæan dogmas.[272] We have but to open his celebrated refutation of Marcion’s _Antitheses_, to acquaint ourselves with the _fine-fleur_ of monkish abuse of the Christian school; an abuse so faithfully carried through the middle ages, to be renewed again in our present day--at the Vatican. “Now, then, ye hounds, yelping at the God of Truth, whom the apostles cast out, to all your questions. These are the bones of contention which ye gnaw,” etc.[273] “The poverty of the Great African’s arguments keeps pace with his abuse,” remarks the author of _Supernatural Religion_.[274] “Their (the Father’s) religious controversy bristles with misstatements, and is turbid with pious abuse. Tertullian was a master of his style, and the vehement vituperation with which he opens and often interlards his work against ‘the impious and sacrilegious Marcion,’ offers anything but a guarantee of fair and legitimate criticism.” How firm these two Fathers--Tertullian and Epiphanius--were on their theological ground, may be inferred from the curious fact that they intemperately both vehemently reproach “the beast” (Marcion) “with erasing passages from the _Gospel of Luke_ which never were in _Luke_ at all.”[275] “The lightness and inaccuracy,” adds the critic, “with which Tertullian proceeds, are all the better illustrated by the fact that not only does he accuse Marcion falsely, but _he actually defines the motives_ for which he expunged a passage _which never existed_; in the same chapter he also similarly accuses Marcion of erasing (from _Luke_) the saying that Christ had not come to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them, and he actually repeats the charge on two other occasions.[276] Epiphanius also commits the mistake of reproaching Marcion with omitting from _Luke_ what is only found in _Matthew_.”[277] Having so far shown the amount of reliance to be placed in the Patristic literature, and it being unanimously conceded by the great majority of biblical critics that what the Fathers fought for was not _truth_, but their own interpretations and unwarranted assertions,[278] we will now proceed to state what were the views of Marcion, whom Tertullian desired to annihilate as the most dangerous _heretic_ of his day. If we are to believe Hilgenfeld, one of the greatest German biblical critics, then “From the critical standing-point one must ... consider the statements of the Fathers of the Church only as expressions of their _subjective view_, which itself requires proof.”[279]