“The said heretics, then, being blind to the truth, cannot help walking out of the track into one path after another, and hence it is that the vestiges of their doctrine are scattered about without any rule or sequence. Whereas the road of those who are of the Church goes round the whole world, because it possesses a firm tradition from the Apostles, and gives us to see that all have one and the same faith, where all enjoin one and the same God the Father, believe one disposition of the Son of God’s incarnation, know the same gift of the Spirit, meditate on the same precepts, guard the same regimen of ecclesiastical rule, await the same advent of the Lord, and support the same salvation of the whole man, body and soul alike. Now the Church’s preaching is true and firm, in whom one and the same way of salvation is shown through the whole world. For to her is intrusted the light of God; and hence the wisdom of God, by which He saves all men, ‘is sung at her entrance, acts with confidence in her streets, is proclaimed on her walls, and speaks ever in the gates of the city.’ For everywhere the Church proclaims the truth: she is the seven-branched candlestick bearing Christ’s light.”(227) It has been necessary to give at considerable length the very words of S. Irenæus, because they are stronger and more perspicuous than any summary of them can be, and because they exhibit a complete answer not to this particular heresy only, but to all heresy for ever. Such an answer, coming from one who stood at the second generation from S. John, is of the highest value. Thus he meets the gnostic principle that divine truth is acquired by the individual through some process of his own mind, which in this particular case is termed gnosis, but which may bear many other names, by appealing to an external standard, the Rule of Faith in the Church from the beginning, which by its unity points to its origin and lineage from the apostles and Christ. And this serves to bring out the central idea which rules his whole mind, that “where the Church is, there also is the Spirit of God; and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and all grace: but the Spirit is Truth.” The deposit of which he spoke is not a dead mass, or lump of ore, requiring only safe custody, but a living Spirit dwelling in the Church, the source within her of unity, truth, and grace, using her teaching office, which is set up in her episcopate, for the drawing out and propagation of the deposit from the double fountain of Tradition and Scripture, for these her teachers as such have a divine gift of truth.(228) It is thus that he expands without altering the doctrine of his teacher Polycarp’s fellow-disciple, “Where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic Church.”(229) And from it he proceeds to what follows necessarily on such a conception, that this Church must have a visible point of unity. As then he appeals to the churches founded by Apostles as the principal centres of living tradition,