This Letter of Ignatius breathes in its nervous and impassioned words a complete fearlessness, though the awful trial lay immediately before him; it tells of an intense and impassioned desire on the part of the writer to be allowed to bear his witness to the love of Christ—to be permitted “to resist unto blood” (Heb. xii. 4). The whole of the short letter is, in fact, a passionate cry for martyrdom.
Ignatius wrote somewhat as follows:
“Dear Roman Congregation,—Do nothing which may hinder me from finishing my course. If you keep silence, God will speak through me.” (He evidently feared that, through the intercession of powerful friends whom the great teacher knew he possessed in the capital, the death sentence might be postponed, possibly annulled.)
“Pray”—he wrote—“that I may have strength to do as well as to say. If only you will keep silence and leave me alone,—I am a word of God; but if you desire my life—then shall I be again a mere cry. It is good to get from the world unto God that I may rise unto Him.
“I would that all men should know that of my own free will, I die for God.... Let me be given to the wild beasts, that I may be found pure bread of God (or of Christ). Bear with me.... Now am I beginning to be a disciple.... Come fire and cross and grapplings with wild beasts, wrenching of bones, hacking of limbs, crushings of my whole body. Come cruel tortures of the devil to assail me. Only be it mine to attain unto Jesus Christ!... Him I seek who died on our behalf. Him I desire who rose again for our sake.... Suffer me to receive the pure light: when I am come thither, then I shall be a man. Let me be an imitator of the Passion of my God....”
“I write unto you in the midst of life, yet lusting after death. My desire (or my love of life) has been crucified, there is (now) no fire of earthly longing in me but only water, living and speaking in me and saying within me, ‘Come to the Father.’ I have no delight in the food of corruption or in the delights of life. I desire the bread of God which is the flesh of Christ, ... and for drink I desire His blood, which is love incorruptible.”
This was the new marvellous spirit in which the early Christian martyrs met and welcomed with a strange intense gladness, torture, ignominy, death. This was the spirit which the great pagan statesmen who sat at the helm of the Empire in Rome dreaded with a nameless dread, and longed to crush and to destroy, the new spirit which the wisest and most far-seeing among them felt was ever ringing the death-knell of the pagan cult, the cult they connected with the genesis, the power, and the very life of the Roman system, the cult which deified Rome and worshipped the genius of Rome’s Emperor.
PART III
THE GREAT NUMBER OF MARTYRS IN THE FIRST TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS
Introductory
Considerable stress has been laid in the preceding pages on the question of the duration of the periods of persecution and the consequent number of martyrs who suffered in these periods. It has commonly been assumed that after the death of Nero a lengthened period of quiet was enjoyed by the Church of Rome as in the provinces, and that the sect of Christians was generally left unmolested during the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, and indeed of Domitian, until quite the last years of his life.