with his Lord, he is reckoned to have been at least a hundred years old, and even then there were some who would not believe him to be really dead, but deemed that he was lying in a deep sleep in his tomb at Ephesus, awaiting his awakening at the second Advent, and tarrying till his Master should come.

But this was a vain superstition, for had it so been, the beloved disciple would have obtained a lot far inferior to those of the thousands he beheld with white robes and palms in their hands. He slept indeed, but his spirit had found its home, and joined the friends, the brother, and the more than brother, more than friend, of his lifetime; and his words, deeply instinct with the Spirit of God, are living with us still, living, soaring, and bearing us up. So that whereas each Gospel is considered to have an emblem among the cherubic forms, the emblem of St. John's is the eagle, which has the loftiest flight, the keenest eye, the highest and surest nest, of all created beings.

CHAPTER VIII.

IGNATIUS, THE CHILD-LIKE SAINT.

They met the tyrant's brandished steel,

The lion's gory mane;

They bowed their necks the death to feel,
Who follows in their train?"-Bp. Heber.

When the disciples were wrangling at Capernaum as to which should be the greatest, their Lord rebuked them by calling a little child, placing him in the midst, and as He held him in His arms, saying, "Except ye be converted and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven, and whoso shall receive one such little child in My Name, receiveth Me; but whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in Me, it were better for him that a mill-stone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."

It has been from the earliest times the belief of the Syriac Church that this favoured little child was Ignatius, and that it was therefore that he was sur

named Theophorus. This word, according whether the accent be placed on the first or the second o, signifies in Greek, either the God-carried, or the God-carrier. And as we shall see, Ignatius himself explained it in the second sense, but this might have been because the first would have been even more incomprehensible to his auditor; and though the legend, identifying him with that child is utterly unproved, there are circumstances that dispose us to receive it as not improbable.

Ignatius is known to have been bred up from earliest childhood among the Apostles, nursed up among them, and always with them; and certainly the words of the Saviour, while applying to all His little ones, give the impression that He was preparing the Apostles for the tenderness, reverence, and watchfulness that the presence of a young child among them would require. May Ignatius not, then, be reckoned as the first of the many orphan babes whom the Church has received and bred up in Her Master's Name, and for His sake?

No record of the nation or country of Ignatius has been preserved; but if this legend were true, he would probably have been a native of the lake country of Galilee. And his name, which signifies" Fiery," is a corrupt Latin one, such as was sometimes borne by the Jews. It was also accordant with the spirit of St. John, that just as he kept himself subordinate to St. Peter after the second rebuke to his ambition, so he should have made the child thus put forward by his Master his own special charge; and Ignatius was

his own pupil, brought up by him, and thus conversing also frequently with St. Peter and St. Paul.

He probably remained in close attendance on St. John, following him as Luke, Timothy, Titus, and Trophimus waited on St. Paul, until his training was completed; and, about the year 65, when he would have been between thirty and forty years of age, he was sent to govern the Gentile Church of Antioch.

How perilous a position, and how wise and firm a man was there needed, we shall understand by a glance at the city and its history. The peninsula of Asia Minor projects almost exactly at right angles to the coast of Syria, each country being built, as it were, on the frame-work of its skeleton range of mountains-the Taurus forming the horizontal line running east and west, and the Lebanon coming down southward from it. At the meeting angle of these two chains of hills, the river Orontes rushes out between them on its way to the sea; and this nook, with the glorious mountain back-ground, the sea in front, the river in the midst, and the fertile soil, sure to be produced by these combined causes, formed a most inviting place for a city. None was, however, built there till B.C. 300, when Seleucus, one of Alexander's generals, having succeeded in mastering Syria, Babylonia, and great part of Asia Minor, founded a city to be the capital of his mighty dominions, and named it Antiochia from the name of his father and his son, who were both called Antiochus. In peopling his city he invited a large colony of Jews thither, promising them a magistrate of their own nation, and equal

rights with those of the Greeks whom he settled in the same place and though the Jews properly belonged to the Egyptian kingdom of Ptolemy, a large number accepted his invitation, and lived and traded prosperously at Antioch.

It became a magnificent place, consisting of four cities joined in one, built by four successive kings, and its most special beauty was a great wide street four miles long, and on each side adorned with double colonnades of pillars, beautiful in themselves, and supporting roofs that gave shelter from the noonday sun. But Antioch was for many years a word of evil omen to Jerusalem. There dwelt those kings of the north, prophesied of by Daniel, whose wars with the Egyptian kings of the south were mostly fought out in Palestine; and when the Jews had weakly and treacherously deserted the mild, friendly rule of the Ptolemies, and given themselves over to the house of Seleucus, they had fallen under that deadly persecution which had led to their independence and to their fatal alliance with the Romans.

The Levant has an enervating climate for men of European birth, and the Greeks of Antioch deteriorated in a few generations. The Romans conquered them in due time, and made Antioch the head-quarters of the Proconsul of Syria. Then it became more magnificent than ever, and was considered as the third city in the empire-Rome itself, and Seleucia on the Tigris, being its only superiors in wealth, splendour, and population. Beautiful gardens bordered the river, and the delicious breezes from the