It is manifest from this that he thought the private Christian must sometimes pass judgment upon his bishop, and might be called upon to separate from him, and to adhere to those who were more orthodox. In what cases this was requisite, or what was to be the extent of the alienation, he does not give any hint; but this clearly establishes that he thought private judgment upon religious controversy to be sometimes a duty: for without the exercise of private judgment upon the part of the layman, it would be in some cases impossible for him to show his preference for those bishops who adhered to the Apostles' doctrine.
We find no trace in Irenæus of any authority in the Church of Rome to decide controversies for the rest of the Church. On the contrary, he taught Christians to have recourse to any ancient apostolical Church, or rather collection of Churches(186), if they wished to ascertain the traditional system of the Church. He indeed quotes that Church as being in his time a more important witness to the truth than any other individual Church, because, through the continual concourse of Christians thither, in consequence of its more powerful pre-eminence, the traditions of the universal Church were there collected as it were into a focus(187); but, as I have pointed out elsewhere(188), he recognises no authority in that Church to _claim_ to decide controversies. With him it is not any individual Church that is commissioned to preserve the truth, not even the Church of Jerusalem, which he calls the mother of all Churches (a title which has been since arrogated by the Roman Church), but the Catholic Church, truly so called, by the mouth of her pastors throughout the world; for although he mentions the pre-eminence of the Church of Rome in his day as a matter of _fact_, he does not state it to be a matter of _right_; nor does he ground any thing upon it but the further fact that it followed, of course, that Christians resorted to it from all quarters, as they did afterwards to Constantinople. He gives no hint as to the source of that pre-eminence, other than its having been settled by the _two_ Apostles St. Peter and _St. Paul_, and honoured with being the scene of their martyrdom(189). And his appeal to it he builds, not on any authority residing in it, but upon the fact that _at that time_ the confluence from all parts of the Church caused the tradition of the whole Church to be best preserved there, as was afterwards the case at Constantinople, and has since been no where. So that his appeal to Rome is not in fact an appeal to that Church, but to the Church universal; and since Rome has ceased to be the place of resort to the universal Church, the ground for appealing to her has ceased likewise.