It is not, however, so much on these as on so-called anachronisms that
assailants have attacked the letters. In every instance a supposed
success has ended in a reverse. Thus the term 'leopard,' applied to the
soldiers who conveyed Ignatius,[77] was said to have been unknown before
the age of Constantine; and it was argued that the forger of these
letters had antedated the word by two centuries. Pearson pointed out an
example of the word about A. D. 202; but the Bishop of Durham has found
it in a rescript of the Emperors Marcus and Commodus (A. D. 177-80), and
in an early treatise written by Galen, which carries it back within
about half a century of Ignatius. Evidently it was then a familiar term.
Another alleged anachronism is the use of the term 'Catholic
Church.'[78] Cureton and others have urged, that a period of full fifty
years must have intervened between the time when Ignatius wrote and the
first trace we find of the term 'Catholic Church.' This, says Bishop
Lightfoot, 'is founded on the confusion of two wholly different
things'--Catholic as a technical, and Catholic as a general term.
Centuries before the Christian era, the word Catholic [Greek:
katholikos] is found in the sense of 'universal'; both before and
after the age of Ignatius it is common in writers, classical and
ecclesiastical. 'In this sense the word might have been used at any
time, and by any writer, from the first moment that the Church began to
spread, while yet the conception of its unity was present to the mind.'
It was only later that the term 'Catholic' acquired a technical
meaning--orthodoxy as opposed to heresy, conformity as opposed to
dissent. In Smyrn. 8, 'where Jesus Christ is, there is the Catholic
Church,' the word is used in its sense of 'universal,' as contrasted
with the Smyrnaean or local Church over which Polycarp presided. Not only
is its use here not indicative of a later date, but this archaic sense
emphasizes an early one. After the word 'Catholic' had acquired its
later and technical use, it could not have been employed in its earliest
meaning without the risk of considerable confusion.

We must refer our readers to a similarly thorough refutation of the
charge of anachronism brought against these letters on account of their
use of the term 'Christian,' and suggest to them an examination of the
interesting proofs of the position next secured,[79] that certain
characteristics of style and diction tell largely in favour