ition about A.D. 269, [420:2]
seems to have been a dwelling appropriated to the use of the
ecclesiastical functionaries, [420:3] and the schemer who wrote the
first draft of these letters evidently believed that the ministers of
Christ should be a brotherhood of bachelors. Hence Ignatius is made thus
to address Polycarp and his clergy--"Labour together one with another;
make the struggle together one with another; run together one with
another; suffer together one with another; _sleep together one with
another; rise together one with another_." Polycarp and others of the
elders of Smyrna were probably married; [420:4] so that some
inconvenience might have attended this arrangement.

The word _bishop_ is another term found in these Epistles, and employed
in a sense which it did not possess at the alleged date of their
publication. Every one knows that, in the New Testament, it does not
signify the chief pastor of a Church; but, about the middle of the
second century, as will subsequently appear, [421:1] it began to have
this acceptation. Clement of Rome, writing a few years before the time
of the martyrdom of Ignatius, uses the words bishop and presbyter
interchangeably. [421:2] Polycarp, in his own Epistle, dictated,
perhaps, forty years after the death of the Syrian pastor, still adheres
to the same phraseology. In the Peshito version of the New Testament,
executed probably in the former half of the second century, [421:3] the
same terminology prevails. [421:4] Ignatius, however, is far in advance
of his generation. When new terms are introduced, or when new meanings
are attached to designations already current, it seldom happens that an
old man changes his style of speaking. He is apt to persevere, in spite
of fashion, in the use of the phraseology to which he has been
accustomed from his childhood. But Ignatius is an exception to all such
experience, for he repeats the new nomenclature with as much flippancy
as if he had never heard any other. [421:5] Surely this minister of
Antioch must be worthy of all the celebrity he has attained, for he can
not only carry on a written correspondence with the dead, but also
anticipate by half a century even the progress of language!

V. The puerilities, vapouring, and mysticism of these letters proclaim
their forgery. We would expect an aged apostolic minister, on his way to
martyrdom, to speak as a man in earnest, to express himself with some
degree of dignity, and to eschew tr