fallen asleep. When the Council of Nice cited "the ancient customs as the normal example of the Catholic Church, Antioch was the great original to which their testimony necessarily reverted. Happily, we possess in our day a wealth of material for deciding what this primitive school received and taught, such as has never before been enjoyed for many centuries. The brilliant light which has been concentrated upon it by the learning and genius of Lightfoot has closed a long period of controversies excited by the interests which all modern schools feel to be at stake when their tenets and teachings are referred to it as a test. Its great martyr bishop, Ignatius, had seen. St. John; in all probability had been his disciple. Under Trajan he was thrown to the lions in the Flavian Amphitheatre. His Epistles, sifted to the bran in a prolonged and unparalleled controversy, are now in our hands in their genuine form, and furnish us with a mirror of the virgin Church in its manners, its ordinances, and its doctrines. Nobody is fit to discuss the principles of unity and catholicity who has not studied the Scriptures in the reflected light of what Ignatius shows to have been the ordinances of inspired wisdom. But his practical maxims are like "the goads and nails" of Solomon himself. Some of them lose little by translation, so pungent are they and so sententious. To Polycarp he bequeaths his mantle, like another Elijah going up in a fiery car and dropping his raiment on Elisha. "The times demand thee," he says to his successor, "as pilots seek the haven." Would God we more nearly resem bled Ignatius and his faithful contemporaries, among whom Polycarp is chief, in their zeal for truth, their sanctity of life, and their fidelity even unto death to our Master, Christ; but, so far as the conformities of the Anglican Church to an apostolic original are concerned, we may rejoice indeed that the church of Antioch, as Ignatius portrays it, is the triumphant vindication of our Anglican reformers and their work of restoration in the sixteenth century. IO. APOSTOLIC FATHERS.-IGNATIUS. Though it is much later that Antioch assumes a leading place as a school, we associate it with the lead in Christian literature, as the source of "the Apostolic Fathers." Of Melito and Clement of Rome, the earliest of whom we have genuine remains, I shall speak by and by. The venerable Ignatius, on his way to martyrdom at Rome, and all the way" fighting with beasts," as he describes it, with reference to the rude soldiers that guarded him, wrote letters to the churches, and also to Polycarp, "angel of the church of Smyrna," his compeer and coeval in the school of the Apostles, which are among the choicest treasures of antiquity. To think of such a good thing coming so early out of Antioch! In vain may we search all heathen moralists for the lofty, unselfish philosophy which breathes in every sentiment of Ignatius, and inspires those inimitable maxims. Here are specimens, taken chiefly from the single epistle to Polycarp: 1. "Consider the times, but look to I. Him who is above time." 2. "A Christian is not his own master, but waits upon God." 3. "Slight not the slaves and the maid-servants." 4. "Find time to pray without ceasing." 5. "The crown is immortality." 6. "Stand like a beaten anvil; it is the part of a good athlete to be bruised, and to prevail."1 His subsequent suffering in the Coliseum, under the persecution which disgraces the name of Trajan, whetted the appetite of the Roman populace for Christian blood. It begot the common outcry of the amphitheatre, Christianos ad leones! Under Hadrian and the Antonines the chronic sacrifices of Christians called forth a new form of patristic literature known as the "Apologies," of which the earlier specimens have perished, but of which we have examples in the precious writings of Justin Martyr. 11. JUSTIN MARTYR. He was a native of Samaria, though a Greek and a philosopher; but Jacob's well was near his native town, and he seems to have drawn his inspiration as a Christian from the water of life that has never ceased to flow ever since the weary Jesus sat by it and discoursed with the woman. This appears in his "Dialogues with Trypho," a Jew whom he laboured to convert; but not less conspicuously in his Apologies, addressed to the sons of Hadrian. These princes were professed philosophers, and Justin addressed them as one who had a right to be heard. He had been a 1 See Note R. student of the Athenian schools, and his pure eclecticism had made him a Platonist. One wonders who may have been that unknown saint of meek and reverend aspect whom he met walking by the sea-side, and who first taught him the better philosophy of Him who is the Light of the World. Unknown as he is, he lives in the illustrious pupil whom he led to Jesus, and who wore his philosopher's pallium not the less when he became a disciple of what he had discovered to be the only philosophy worth professing. In his writings, we become acquainted with the Christians of the first post-apostolic age, and blessed be their pure example. The philosopher addressed his first Apology to Antoninus Pius (A. D. 150), whose reputation is not unstained by the wanton effusion of Christian blood; his second, to "the good Aurelius," as Pope styles him, brutal stoic though he was, and author of a general persecution which raged through the Empire from the Tigris to the Rhone, desolating the churches, and delivering men, women, and children to wild beasts, to the sword, and to the flames, in every imaginable form of cruelty and torture. Under Aurelius, Justin earned his noble surname of the Martyr, and soon after him suffered Melito, Bishop of Sardis, of whose works a valuable fragment remains.2 1 See Lightfoot, Apost. Fathers, II., vol. i. p. 440. 2 Lightfoot, Ibid., pp. 445, 446. Behold, young men, what the Church means by "the noble army of martyrs." This was the fourth persecution, and six more must be; though in fact the first three centuries are one protracted period of war against the followers of the Crucified, which began with Herod's slaughter of the Innocents, and stayed not till the Arch of Constantine was set up to commemorate the first peace. The Apologists imply the martyrs. Their blood was "the seed of the Church"; but "Their ashes flew No marble tells us whither; with their names Is cold on this." The fury of their adversaries drove the sufferers like "conies to the stony rocks," to the deserts, to the catacombs. They were scorned for burrowing like the marmot, and were derided as "shunners of daylight." Light-shunning yet light-shedding; to them the ages and the nations that call themselves. enlightened owe all their illumination. They were the victims of those who made "Philosophy" their boast. 13. POLYCARP. The hoary and holy Polycarp suffered under that paragon of "philosophic" princes, the elder Antonine. He was the disciple of St. John, and was 1 A. D. 155. See Lightfoot's elaborate evidence, and his somewhat successful relief of Hadrian's reputation. Ibid., pp. 440, 492, and 628-702. |