Order of Treatment.

The order in which these writings can best be arranged and approached presents a difficult problem, which has been variously dealt with but not solved. The earlier literature can be grouped according to type as letters, revelations, gospels, and acts, with the individual works arranged chronologically within the several groups. But when the more conscious literary movement begins, with the apologists and the writers against the sects, the scene is constantly changing from West to East and back again, and soon in the West we have Latin writers at work simultaneously with Greek, gradually taking over the Western literary field from them. The arrangement by types of literature — apologies, antiheretical works, commentaries, and so forth — is helpful, but with such a treatment those diligent writers who worked in three or four different types would have to be taken up over and over again. So it seems preferable to present the work of each of these many-sided individuals as a unit in relation to his times and problems; this is obviously the best way to describe the writings of men like Irenaeus, Clement, Tertullian, Hippolytus, and Origen.