[Sidenote: Tatian] There was one Christian of some note in the second century, whose attitude toward everything Greek is original and interesting. Tatian was "born in the land of the Assyrians."[8] He travelled widely in the Graeco-Roman world,[9] and studied rhetoric like a Greek; he gave attention to the great collections of Greek art in Rome--monuments of shame, he called them. He was admitted to the mysteries, but he became shocked at the cruelty and licentiousness tolerated and encouraged by paganism. While in this mind, seeking for the truth, "it befel that I lit upon some barbarian writings, older than the dogmata of the Greeks, divine in their contrast with Greek error; and it befel too that I was convinced by them, because, their style was simple, because there was an absence of artifice in the speakers, because the structure of the whole was intelligible, and also because of the fore-knowledge of future {146} events, the excellence of the precepts and the subordination of the whole universe to One Ruler (_to ton holon monarchikon_). My soul was taught of God, and I understood that while Greek literature (_ta men_) leads to condemnation, this ends our slavery in the world and rescues us from rulers manifold and ten thousand tyrants."[10] He now repudiated the Greeks and all their works, the grammarians who "set the letters of the alphabet to quarrel among themselves,"[11] the philosophers with their long hair and long nails and vanity,[12] the actors, poets and legislators; and "saying good-bye to Roman pride and Attic pedantry (_psychrologia_) I laid hold of our barbarian philosophy."[13] He made the first harmony of the Gospels--an early witness to the power of their sheer simplicity in a world of literary affectations. Another famous Syrian of the century was Ignatius of Antioch, whose story is collected from seven letters he wrote, in haste and excitement, as he travelled to Rome to be thrown to the beasts in the arena--his guards in the meantime being as fierce as any leopards. The burden of them all is that Jesus Christ _truly_ suffered on the cross. Men around him spoke of a phantom crucified by the deluded soldiers amid the deluded Jews.--No! cries Ignatius, over and over, he _truly_ suffered, he _truly_ rose, ate and drank, and was no daemon without a body (_daimonion asomaton_)--none of it is _seeming_, it is all truly, truly, truly.[14] He has been called hysterical, and his position might make any nervous man hysterical--death before him, his Lord's reality denied, and only time for one word--_Truly_. Before we pass him by, let us take a quieter saying of his to illustrate the deepest thought of himself and his age--"He that hath the word of Jesus truly can hear his silence also."[15]