Men, with tear-stained faces, looked away from his death to 'form themselves'—as he had bidden them—
'into a chorus in love and sing to the Father in Jesus Christ. God had vouchsafed that the Bishop from Syria should be found in the West, having summoned him from the East. Good was it to set from this world unto God, that he might rise unto Him.'
Love is perhaps wrong in asserting that his remains were brought back to Antioch: it is unerringly right in having raised the Epistle to the Romans—'his pæan prophetic of his coming victory'—to be the martyr's manual of a grateful posterity.
'The glory of Ignatius as a martyr,' writes the Bishop of Durham, 'has commended his lessons as a doctor. His teaching on matters of theological truth and ecclesiastical order was barbed and fledged by the fame of his constancy in that supreme trial of his faith.'
If interest in the heresies he combated may be said to be confined to-day to scholars who study them as a chapter in heresiology, or seek in them a bone of contention, the interest in the points of ecclesiastical order delineated by him was never more intense than now. Only last year the testimony of the Ignatian Epistles to the burning question of Apostolical succession was one point in the discussion between Canon Liddon of St. Paul's and Dr. Hatch; this year, the view presented by the Bishop of Durham meets with its ablest antagonist in Dr. Harnack. In very truth the letters of the martyr have been the battlefield of the controversy, which affirms or disallows the threefold ministry of the Church of Christ.
It will be perceived at once how much turns, not first upon the interpretation of the Epistles, but upon the genuineness of the text presenting itself for interpretation. What is the text? Never before have the lovers of textual criticism had the opportunity of examining and answering this question as they have now in the Bishop of Durham's volumes. He first describes at length the Manuscripts and Versions, on which a true text may be reasonably founded, and then gives the text, together with the Versions, accompanied by Introductions and Notes which leave nothing to desire. The labour necessary for massing and bringing together all this information is only equalled by the exactness and orderliness with which it is presented. But the Bishop writes not only for the scholar, but for the man of general culture and intelligence, who can enter with interest into a problem historical and antiquarian, as well as textual and critical. To many the battle of the giants, over the 'long,' the 'middle,' and the 'short,' form or recension of the Ignatian Epistles, will be an intellectual treat, as he watches the fence and scholarship of the various disputants. He will see that in literary as in political controversy the spirit of compromise is to-day in the ascendant, and that 'middle'-men have for once their value.
To explain these terms. By the 'short' form is meant that which consists of three Epistles only—to St. Polycarp, to the Ephesians, and to the Romans. This exists only in a Syraic version. By the second, 'the middle form,' are understood these three Epistles, and four more, namely, Epistles to the Smyrnæans, Magnesians, Philadelphians, and Trallians. This form is originally Greek, and is found also in Latin, Armenian, and—in a fragmentary state—in Syriac and Coptic. The third or 'long' form, contains the seven already enumerated in a more expanded state, together with six others, the recension being in a Greek and in a Latin translation.[69]
Practically the contest as to the truest form has been reduced to a duel between the 'short' and the 'middle.' The 'long' form can be shown to be the work of an unknown author, probably of the latter half of the fourth century, and constructed from the genuine Ignatian Epistles by interpolation, alteration and omission. But the 'long' form died hard, and mainly through the thrusts of our own Ussher.
'The history of the Ignatian Epistles,' says the Bishop, 'in Western Europe before and after the revival of letters, is full of interest. In the Middle Ages the spurious and interpolated letters alone have any wide circulation. Gradually, as the light advances, the forgeries recede into the background. Each successive stage diminishes the bulk of the Ignatian literature, which the educated mind accepts as genuine; till at length the true Ignatius alone remains, divested of the accretions which perverted ingenuity has gathered about him.'
In the 'long' recension there is a letter to one Mary of Cassobola. This was made the parent of a 'correspondence between St. John and the Virgin,' bearing the name of Ignatius: and it is not improbably connected with the outburst of Mariolatry in the eleventh and following centuries. But with 'the first streak of intellectual dawn this Ignatian spectre vanished into its kindred darkness.' The forgery was 'consigned to the limbo of foolish and forgotten things.' This pretender set aside, St. Ignatius was represented in Western Europe by the epistles of the 'Long' recension. The Latin text was printed in 1498, and the Greek in 1557. At first no doubt was felt about their genuineness. Gradually, however, unwelcome critics pointed out gross anachronisms and blunders. Men, with unpleasant habits of comparison, noted that Eusebius, the Church historian (C. a. d. 310-25), quoted from only seven epistles, and that the divergence of the 'long' text from that given by early Christian writers[70] fully warranted the comment of Ussher, that it was difficult to imagine 'eundem legere se Ignatium qui veterum ætate legebatur.' Theological and ecclesiastical prejudice lent bitterness to the rising strife. On the Continent, Reformer and Romanist ranged themselves in opposite camps: the one quoting with delight passages which favoured Roman supremacy, or advocated Episcopacy; the other throwing them over as 'nursery stories' (or 'silly tales,' nænia), and denouncing 'the insufferable impudence of those who equipped themselves with ghosts like these for the purpose of deceiving' (Calvin). After the publication of the edition of Vedelius, a Genevan Professor, in 1623, Anglican writers, such as Whitgift, Hooker, and Andrewes, seem to have accepted without hesitation the twelve (the seven named by Eusebius and five others) contained in that edition; but in England as on the Continent, the absence of so much, which could alone lead men to a right conclusion, prevented the consideration of the question on its true merits:—