used, if the event had happened _during a divided sovereignty_." [50:3]
The bishop cannot, at this stage of the discussion, decently
refuse to recognise the potency of his own argument.

The three reasons just enumerated show conclusively that A.D. 155,
for which the Bishop of Durham contends so strenuously, cannot be
accepted as the date of the martyrdom. For some years after this,
Anicetus was not placed at the head of the Church of the Imperial
city; and he must have been for a considerable time in that
position, when Polycarp paid his visit to Rome. We have seen that
the aged pastor of Smyrna suffered in the reign of Marcus Aurelius;
and that A.D. 169 is the earliest period to which we can refer
the martyrdom, inasmuch as that was the first year in which
Marcus Aurelius was sole emperor. All the reliable chronological
indications point to this as the more correct reckoning.

It has now, we believe, been demonstrated by a series of solid and
concurring testimonies, that Archbishop Ussher made no mistake
when he fixed on A.D. 169 as the proper date of Polycarp's
martyrdom. The bearing of this conclusion on the question of the
Ignatian Epistles must at once be apparent. Polycarp was eighty-six
years of age at the time of his death; and it follows that in
A.D. 107,--or sixty-two years before,--when the Ignatian letters
are alleged to have been dictated, he was only four-and-twenty.
The absurdity of believing that at such an age he wrote the
Epistle to the Philippians, or that another apostolic Father would
then have addressed him in the style employed in the Ignatian
correspondence, must be plain to every reader of ordinary
intelligence. No wonder that the advocates of the genuineness of
these Epistles have called into requisition such an enormous