‘The question is whether Ignatius came to appropriate this world of thought through reading our Fourth Gospel, or whether he must be held to be an independent witness to this mode of thinking. Up to a certain point the preceding investigation has already shown that the latter is the case. Although, for instance, certain details might seem to point to borrowing from the Fourth Gospel, yet this peculiar religious Modalism, this mysticism, this combination and accentuation of the same points, this special form of faith in Christ, and, in general, this identical mode of thought and belief could not be simply transferred by means of a book to one who had not in other ways taken up the same ideas and made them his own. There is also proof from various turns given to the thought, as from his use of an independent terminology, that the author is in possession of “Johannean” ideas as his own property. So that in case we really came to the result that Ignatius was acquainted with the Fourth Gospel, we should have indeed to refer to that acquaintance the portrait that he draws of Christ and some details, but in spite of that we should have to hold fast the conclusion that in appropriating his general conception of things, Ignatius must have come under the prolonged influence of a community itself influenced by Johannean thought’ (p. 139). It will have been observed that the reason for thinking that the affinity of thought between Ignatius and St. John is not to be explained by the use of a book, is not because of its slightness but because it is really too deep to be accounted for in that way. It is true that the affinity goes very deep. I had occasion a few years ago to study rather closely the Ignatian letters, and I was so much impressed by it as even to doubt whether there is any other instance of resemblance between a biblical and patristic book, that is really so close. Allowing for a certain crudity of expression in the later writer and remembering that he is a perfervid Syrian and not a Greek, he seems to me to reflect the Johannean teaching with extraordinary fidelity. This applies especially to his presentation of the doctrine of the Incarnation, to his conception of the Logos, and of the relation of Christ at once to the Father and to the believer. In the writers of the next generation to Ignatius e. g. in Justin—the conception of the Logos is infected by Greek philosophy, giving to it more or less the sense of reason, whereas in Ignatius the leading idea is, as we have seen it to be in St. John, that of revelation. Nowhere else have we the idea of the fullness of Godhead revealed in Christ grasped and expressed with so much vigour. What difference there is is of the nature of exaggeration. It is not wrong to say that the language of Ignatius tends towards Modalism. But it is just because he has grasped ideas, for every one of which there