Popery condemned by scripture and the fathers - End Time Deception

20- POPERY CONDEMNED BY
berless quotations with which, he says, polemical
writers abound, there are only two from authors
who wrote before the fourth century. One of
these, Dorotheus, lived about the end of the
third ; and is said, by the R.'s great friend Bellarmine,
to be full of fables.
The other is Ireneus,
who, says he, " gives a catalogue of the Bi-
" shops of Rome down to Pope Eleutherius, his
own cotemporary in the year 176.
He begins
with Peter and Paul, and says of Clement,
that he was the third from the apostles *.*'
Had the R. said, that Ireneus ought to have
begun with Peter and Paul, he w ould have expressed
the sentiments of the Roman church.
But this father appears to have been a stranger
to Peter's particular relation to that See.
apostles, he only says,
These
founded the church, as a
re-examination of his language will shew him :
*'
The blessed apostles, therefore, having found-
*^
ed and built the church, delivered the episcopal
** office to Linus, whom Paul has mentioned in
«'
his epistles to Timothy. Anencletus succeeded
^' him ; after whom, in the third place from the
**
apostles, Clemens had the bishopric allotted
« him."
According to this tradition, the apostle Paul
has as good a claim to the bishopric of Rome
as the apostle Peter ; since they are said to have
founded the See of Rome conjunctly. That
* P. 184.
^
church