heroes was surely based on something which was true and real.
Some eighty or at most ninety years before Tertullian lived and wrote, Ignatius, Bishop of Antioch, on his way to Rome, where he was doomed to be exposed to the wild beasts in the great amphitheatre, wrote his famous letter to the Roman Church.
The date of the letter is about A.D. 107-10. The little writing was highly esteemed in the early Church. It may be fairly styled a vade mecum of martyrs in the age of persecution. It accurately embodies the thoughts and aspirations which the "School of Martyrs" we have been picturing taught its pupils. We will give some of these thoughts as a fitting conclusion to this little study on "Preparation for Martyrdom" as practised during the first two hundred and fifty years.
This Letter of Ignatius breathes in its nervous and impassioned words a complete fearlessness, though the awful trial lay immediately before him; it tells of an intense and impassioned desire on the part of the writer to be allowed to bear his witness to the love of Christ—to be permitted "to resist unto blood" (Heb. xii. 4). The whole of the short letter is, in fact, a passionate cry for martyrdom.
Ignatius wrote somewhat as follows:
"Dear Roman Congregation,—Do nothing which may hinder me from finishing my course. If you keep silence, God will speak through me." (He evidently feared that, through the intercession of powerful friends whom the great teacher knew he possessed in the capital, the death sentence might be postponed, possibly annulled.)
"Pray"—he wrote—"that I may have strength to do as well as to say. If only you will keep silence and leave me alone,—I am a word of God; but if you desire my life—then shall I be again a mere cry. It is good to get from the world unto God that I may rise unto Him.
"I would that all men should know that of my own free will, I die for God. . . . Let me be given to the wild beasts, that I may be found pure bread of God (or of Christ). Bear
