my whole body! Come cruel tortures of
the devil to assail me! Only be it mine to attain unto Jesus
Christ!'

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 paean 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
ord