on was finally rectified in 1689 by Ruinart. From
the middle of the seventeenth century disputants ceased to trouble
themselves about the 'long' form. Controversy, presently to be noted,
raged about the Vossian letters, Daille (1666) attacking them, Pearson
defending them.

It is a great leap to the year 1845, but not till then did a new era
dawn upon the questions at issue. It was in that year that Cureton
published the 'Antient Syriac Version of the Epistles of St. Ignatius to
St. Polycarp, the Ephesians, and the Romans.' This version was
discovered in two MSS. at the British Museum, and contained the Epistles
named in a shorter form than either of the Greek or Latin texts.[73]
Cureton's contention was that he had discovered the genuine Ignatius,
and that the remaining four Epistles of the Vossian collection, as well
as the additional portions of these three, were forgeries. Cureton was
opposed by Dr. Wordsworth, the late Bishop of Lincoln, then Canon of
Westminster, and defended by Bunsen. There followed quickly the
_Vindiciae Ignatianae_ (1846) and _Corpus Ignatianum_ (1849), in which
Cureton was considered to have not only refuted his adversary, but also
to have presented arguments which rallied to his standard Ritschl,
Lipsius, Pressense, Ewald, Milman, and Boehringer. Opposition to
Cureton's view was not, however, wanting. The Orientalists, Petermann
and Merx, united with the Conservative critical school, represented by
Denzinger and Uhlhorn, in preferring the Vossian collection; while the
Tuebingen school (Baur and Hilgenfeld) opposed itself to Ignatian
letters, short, middle, or long, as utterly subversive of their theories
of the growth of the Canon, and of the history of the Early Church. The
Bishop of Durham was himself, at that time on Cureton's side, 'led
captive' (as he says) 'for a time by the tyranny of this dominant
force.' We can but record the change in his opinions, and leave to the
reader to follow, in the Bishop's own pages, the reasons which induced
him to abandon a method and decline results that would not stand the
test of a searching criticism. Independent investigation of the
phenomena of the Armenian version and of the Syriac fragments led him to
regard the 'short' or Curetonian recension as an abridgment or
mutilation, rather than the nucleus, of the 'middle' or Vossian form;
and Zahn's monograph, _Ignatius von Antiochien_(1873), never yet
answered, dealt a fatal blow at the claims of the C