Against the gnostic claim to possess a private tradition, in virtue of which each of them “depraving the rule of the truth was not ashamed to preach himself,” he sets forth the one original tradition which the Apostles,(222) only “when they had first been invested with the power of the Holy Ghost coming down on them, and endued with perfect knowledge,” delivered to the churches founded by them. “And this tradition of the Apostles, manifested in the whole world, may be seen in every church by all who have the will to see what is true, and we can give the chain of those who by the Apostles were appointed bishops in the churches, and their successors down to our time, who have neither taught nor known any such delirious dream as these imagine. For, had the Apostles known any reserved mysteries, which they taught to the perfect separately and secretly from the rest, assuredly they would have delivered them to those especially to whom they intrusted the churches themselves. For very perfect and irreprehensible in all respects did they wish those to be whom they left for their own successors,(223) delivering over to them their own office of teaching, by correct conduct on whose part great advantage would accrue, as from their fall the utmost calamity. But since it were very long, in a volume like this, to enumerate the succession of all the churches, we take the church the greatest, the most ancient, and known to all, founded and established at Rome by the two most glorious Apostles Peter and Paul, and pointing out the tradition which it has received from the Apostles, and the faith which it has announced to men, reaching down to us by the succession of its bishops, we confound all those who form societies other than they ought, in any way, whether for the sake of self-fancied doctrines, or through blindness and an evil mind. For, with this church, on account of its superior principate, it is necessary that every church agree, that is, the faithful everywhere (every church) in which by the (faithful) everywhere, the apostolic tradition is preserved.