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But in every succession (of bishops) and in every city there prevails just what the Law and the Prophets and the Lord proclaim (Eus., H.E., IV. xxii. 3). Irenæus, in his great work against heresies, which was completed about A.D. 185, says,
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We can enumerate those who were appointed bishops by the Apostles themselves in the different Churches, and their successors down to our own day; and they neither taught nor acknowledged any such stuff as is raved by these men.... But since it would be a long business in a work of this kind to enumerate the successions in all the Churches, he selects as a primary example that of
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After giving the succession of Roman bishops from Linus to Eleutherus, he glances at Smyrna, presided over by St. John's disciple, Polycarp, whose letter to the Philippian Church shows what he believed, and at Ephesus, founded as a Church by St. Paul and presided over by St. John, until the times of Trajan (III. iii. 1-3). Again he says, that, although there may be different opinions respecting single passages of Scripture, yet there can be none as to the sum total of its contents, viz.
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And again, still more definitely,
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The Church, though dispersed throughout the whole world even to the ends of the earth, has received from the Apostles and their disciples the belief in one God, Father Almighty, etc.... Having received this preaching and this belief, the Church, as we said before, although dispersed about the whole world, carefully guards it, as if dwelling in one house; and she believes these things, as if she had but one soul and one and the same heart, and with perfect concord she preaches them and teaches them and hands them down, as if she possessed but one mouth. For although the languages up and down the world are different, yet the import of the tradition is one and the same. For neither the Churches which are established in Germany believe anything different or hand down anything different, nor in Spain, nor in Gaul, nor throughout the East, nor in Egypt, nor in Libya, nor those established about the central regions of the earth.... And neither will he who is very mighty in word among those who preside in the Churches utter different [doctrines] from these (for no one is above the Master), nor will he who is weak in speaking lessen the tradition (I. x. 1, 2). Clement of Alexandria (c. A.D. 200) tells us that he had studied in Greece, Italy, and the East, under teachers from Ionia, Cœlesyria, Assyria, and Palestine; and he writes of his teachers thus:
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These men, preserving the true tradition of the blessed teaching directly from Peter and James, from John and Paul, the holy Apostles, son receiving it from father (but few are they who are like their fathers), came by God's providence even to us, to deposit among us those seeds which are ancestral and apostolic (_Strom._, I. p. 322, ed. Potter). Tertullian in like manner appeals to the unbroken tradition, reaching back to the Apostles, in a variety of Churches:
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Run over the Apostolic Churches, in which the very chairs of the Apostles still preside in their places, in which their own authentic writings are read, uttering the voice and representing the face of each of them; and he mentions in particular Corinth, Philippi, Thessalonica, Ephesus, and Rome.
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Is it likely that Churches of such number and weight should have _strayed_ into one and the same faith?