'Speak to each man severally after the manner of God. Bear the maladies of all, as a perfect athlete. Where there is much toil, there is much gain. If thou lovest good scholars, this is not thankworthy in thee. Rather bring the more pestilent to submission by gentleness.... The season requireth thee, as pilots require winds, or as a storm-tossed mariner a haven, that it may attain unto God. Be sober, as God's athlete. The prize is incorruption and life eternal, concerning which thou also art persuaded.'--(Ep. of St. Ignatius to St. Polycarp, I, 2.)
Ignatius of Antioch: Men of old loved to find in his name (or its Syriace quivalent, Nurono, [Greek: youra = phyr], _fire_) a prescience of the torch of divine love which blazed in him. The fancy may pass, if etymologically unsound; for Ignatius, 'the Inflamed,' was a true child of the fiery East. Contrast him and his letters with St. Clement of Rome and his Epistle to the Corinthians. Nothing is more notable in the Roman 'than the calm equable temper,' the 'sweet reasonableness.' He is essentially a _moderator_. On the other hand, impetuosity, fire, strong-headedness, are impressed on every sentence in the Epistles of Ignatius. He is by his very nature an _impeller_ of men. Both are intense, though in different ways. In Clement, the intensity of moderation dominates and guides his conduct. In Ignatius it is the intensity of passion--passion for doing and suffering--which drives him onward. In Clement we listen to the voice of a judge delivering calmly his sentence from his throne; in Ignatius we
'are startled by the ringing cry of the trumpet-call--sharp, stirring, penetrating--sounding for the battle. The fire of the hot East bursts in, like a sun, strong and impassioned; a vivid personality, in flame with love, flashes in upon the world, quivering as a sword of the cherubim; a rhetoric in which the rapid, electric thought breaks out of the strained and formless chaos of the _imagination_, as lightning out of the rolling and dark thunder-cloud; a theology, which, by the intense passion of metaphor, forces an almost violent entrance into the secrets of the Most High; a morality which can carry forward into the heights of holiness the madness of faith, the extravagance of zeal, the recklessness of enthusiasm, the audacity of love, dragging them into the service of Christ at the chariot-wheels of God's triumph--such are the characteristics of Ignatius of Antioch.'[65]