apostolicfathers0201clem - Carmel Apologetics

240 EPISTLES OF S. IGNATIUS.
In England, as on the Continent, the question can hardly be said to
have been considered on its own merits. Episcopacy was the burning
question of the day; and the sides of the combatants in the Ignatian
controversy were already predetermined for them by their attitude
towards this question. Every allowance should be made for their
following their prepossessions, where the evidence seemed so evenly
balanced. On the one hand external testimony was strongly in favour
of the genuineness of certain Ignatian letters; on the other hand the
only Ignatian
letters known were burdened with difficulties. At the
very eve of Ussher's revelation a fierce literary
war broke out on this
very subject of episcopacy — evoked by the religious and political
troubles of the times. In the year 1639, Hall then Bishop of Exeter,
instigated by the Primate Laud, wrote a work entitled Episcopacy by
Divine Right Asserted {Works ix. p. 505 sq, ed. Pratt, 1808). He
confines his quotations to those confessedly 'genuine epistles... seven
in number' (p. 571), which Eusebius knew and which Vedelius acknowledged;
but in these seven he quotes and defends passages (e.g.
Philad. 4) which Vedelius had justly condemned as interpolations.
Two years later (a.d. 1641) he published An Humble Remonstrance
(ix. p.
628 sq) on behalf of Liturgy and Episcopacy. This was
attacked in An Ansiver to the Book entitided an Humble Remonstrance
(London, 1641), by five Presbyterian ministers, under the name
Smectymnuus, a word composed of the initial letters of their names.
To this Hall replied in A Defetice of the Humble Retnotistrance (ix. p.
643). In this work also he quotes Ignatius (p. 672); but here the
passage quoted {Smyrn. 8) is the same in the interpolated recension
as in the original. We may conjecture that he had received a hint
meanwhile from Ussher, and so abstained from quoting the interpolated
text. A collection of tracts also was published at Oxford this same
year in defence of episcopacy ; and in this collection was included
one written by Ussher himself at the earnest importunity of Bishop
Hall (see Ussher's Life and Works i. p. 225) and entitled The Original
of Bishops and Metropolitans {ib. vii. p. 41 sq). In this tract Ussher
significantly confines his quotations from Ignatius
to two or three
passages in which the interpolated recension agrees with the original
text, but he does not breathe a word about his discovery, though the
sheets of his great work on Ignatius were passing through his hands
at the time'. A storm of writings followed on both sides of the ques-
1 The leading facts relating to Ussher's remains, are as follows, (i) In his Anlabours
on Ignatius, as collected from his swer to a Jesuit, published in 1625, he