any appreciable extent affect the generalisations as to the patristic attestation of particular groups of documents obtained by taking a large number of passages together. The broad facts come out clearly: where there is doubt, it for the most part relates to the presence or absence of rare exceptions.
158. When we examine the remains of the Ante-Nicene Christian literature with a view to collect evidence respecting the ancient texts which the groupings of the extant documents shew to have existed, we are for some time after the apostolic age hampered both by the paucity of the writings preserved and by the scantiness and comparative vagueness of the textual materials contained in them. The only period for which we have anything like a sufficiency of representative knowledge consists roughly of three quarters of a century from about 175 to 250: but the remains of four eminent Greek Fathers, which range through this period, cast a strong light on textual history backward and forward. They are Irenæus, of Asia Minor, Rome, and Lyons; his disciple Hippolytus, of Rome; Clement, of Athens and Alexandria; and his disciple Origen, of Alexandria and Palestine. To the same period belong the Latin representatives of North Africa, Tertullian and Cyprian, as also Cyprian's Roman contemporary Novatian. Towards the close of the third century we have somewhat considerable remains of Methodius, of Lycia and Tyre, an enemy of the Origenian school; and in the first third of the fourth century several writings of Eusebius of Cæsarea in Palestine, the most learned of its disciples. For the second half of the third century we have other fragments, but they are few in number.
