literary war broke out on this very
subject of Episcopacy--evoked by the religious and political
troubles of the times.'

On the one side were Hall's (Bishop of Exeter) 'Episcopacy by Divine
Right asserted' (1639), and 'An Humble Remonstrance' on behalf of
Liturgy and Episcopacy (1641); Ussher's 'The original of Bishops and
Metropolitans,' and Jeremy Taylor's 'Of the Sacred Order and Offices of
Episcopacy' (1642); on the other, the five Presbyterian ministers whose
initials composed the monstrous name Smectymnuus,[71] issued their
'Answer to the Book entituled an Humble Remonstrance' (1641), and
Milton, in his short treatise 'Of Prelatical Episcopacy' (1641),
fulminated with 'fiery eloquence and reckless invective' against Ussher.

'Had God,' wrote Milton, 'intended that we should have
sought any part of useful instruction from Ignatius,
doubtless He would not have so ill-provided for our
knowledge as to send him to our hands in this broken and
disjointed plight; and if He intended no such thing, we do
injuriously in thinking to taste better the pure evangelic
manna by seasoning our mouths with the tainted scraps and
fragments from an unknown table, and searching among the
verminous and polluted rags dropped overworn from the
toiling shoulders of Time, with these deformedly to quilt
and interlace the entire, the spotless, and undecaying robe
of Truth. What impiety,' he added, 'the confronting and
paralleling the sacred verity of St. Paul with the offals
and sweepings of antiquity, that met as accidently and
absurdly as Epicurus his atoms to patch up a Leucippean
Ignatius.'

'Out of his own mouth,' says Bishop Lightfoot, 'he was soon convicted.'
The "better provision for knowledge" came full soon. To the critical
genius of Ussher belongs the honour of restoring the true Ignatius.
Ussher observed that the quotations from this Father in three English
writers, Robert (Grosseteste) of Lincoln (c. 1250), John Tyssington (c.
1381), and William Wodeford (c. 1396), agreed--not with texts hitherto
known (the Greek and Latin of the 'long' Recension), but--with the
quotations in Eusebius and Theodoret. He concluded that somewhere in the
libraries of England he ought to find MSS. of a version corresponding to
this earlier text of Ignatius: and he discovered two--(1.) _Caiensis_
395 [L1], a MS. given to Gonville and Cains College, Cambridge,