Ignatius addresses them in the style of a starched and straitlaced churchman.  “Let your treasures,” says he, “be your good works.  Let your baptism be to you as armory.” “Look to the bishop that God also may look upon you.  I will be instead of the souls of those who are subject to the bishop, and the presbyters and the deacons.” [416:6] What intelligent Christian can believe that a minister, instructed by Paul or Peter, and filling one of the most important stations in the apostolic Church, was verily such an ignorant driveller?

III.  The chronological blunders in these Epistles betray their forgery.  In the “Acts of the Martyrdom of Ignatius,” he and Polycarp are represented as “fellow-scholars” of the Apostle John, [417:1] and the pastor of Smyrna is supposed to be, in point of age, at least as venerable a personage as the pastor of Antioch.  The letter to Polycarp is evidently written under the same impression.  Ignatius there says to him—­“I praise God that I have been deemed worthy of thy countenance, which in God I long after.”  When these words are supposed to have been penned, Polycarp was only about six and twenty years of age; [417:2] and the Church of Smyrna, with which he was connected, did not occupy a very prominent place in the Christian commonwealth.  Is it probable that a man of the mature faith and large experience of Ignatius would have thus addressed so youthful a minister?  It also seems passing strange that the aged martyr should commit all the widows of the community to his special guardianship, and should think it necessary to add—­“It is becoming to men and women who marry, that they marry by the counsel of the bishop.”  Was an individual, who was himself not much advanced beyond boyhood, the most fitting person to give advice as to these matrimonial engagements?  A similar mistake as to age is made in the case of Onesimus, who is supposed to be bishop of Ephesus.  This minister, who is understood to be mentioned in the New Testament. [417:3] is said at an early date to have been pastor of the Church of the metropolis of the Proconsular Asia; and the Ignatian forger obviously imagined that he was still alive when his hero passed through Smyrna on his way to the Western capital.  But Onesimus perished in the Domitian persecution, [418:1] so that Ignatius is made to write to a Christian brother who had been long in his grave. [418:2] The fabricator proceeds more cautiously in his letter to the Romans.  How marvellous that this old gentleman, who is willing to pledge his soul for every one who would submit to the bishop, does not find it convenient to name the bishop of Rome!  The experiment might have been somewhat hazardous.  The early history of the Roman Church was better known than that of any other in the world, and, had he here made a mistake, the whole cheat might have been at once detected.  Though his erudition was so great that he could tell “the places of angels,” [418:3] he evidently did not dare to commit himself