apostolicfathers0201clem - Carmel Apologetics

IGNATIUS THE MARTYR. 39
So should the frail become the perfect, rapt
From glory of pain to
glory of joy^.
He felt that if his friends, kindly cruel, should interpose between him
and martyrdom, a golden opportunity would be lost and a grievous
wound inflicted on the Church of Christ. Who shall say that he was
wrong Would it not have been an irreparable loss, if their intercessions
had prevailed
But the example of heroic courage was not the only legacy which
Ignatius bequeathed to the Church. His glory as a martyr commended
his lessofis 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.
The direct interest of his theological teaching has indeed passed
away with the heresy against which it was directed. The docetism
which Ignatius controverted is altogether a thing of the past. Later
generations marvel that such a form of error could have caused even
momentary anxiety to the Church of Christ. It seems so very unsubstantial
;
it is so directly antagonistic to the bias of later aberrations from
the faith. To deny the truth of Christ's humanity, to question the
reality of His birth and life and death in the flesh,
is the shadow of
smoke, is the dream of a dream, to ourselves. Yet all the notices conspire
to show that during a considerable part of the second century it
constituted a very real danger to Christianity. At the same time the
indirect interest of the theological teaching of this father can never fail ;
for it exhibits plainly enough, though in rougher outhne and without
his preciseness of definition, the same insistence on the twofold nature of
Christ— — the humanity and the divinity which distinguished the teaching
of the great Athanasius two centuries and a half later.
On the other hand in matters of ecclesiastical order the direct interest
of the martyr's lessons was never more intense than it is at the
present day. When at the catastrophic epoch of the Reformation
several communities of Christendom broke loose from the form of
government which had prevailed throughout the Church from the close
of the Apostolic age, the notices in the earliest writers bearing on this
subject came to be narrowly scanned. Of all fathers of the Church,
early or late, no one is more incisive or more persistent in advocating
the claims of the threefold ministry to allegiance than Ignatius. Hence
from that time forward his letters have been the battle-field of controversy.
Yet with himself this subject, prominent as it is, was secondary
^
Browning The Ring and The Book iv. p. 78.