'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 so 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.'
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, in 1444 by Walter Crome; and (2.) _Montacutianus_ [L2], a parchment from the library of Bishop Montague or Montacute, of Norwich. Of the first a transcript was made for Archbishop Ussher, and is still in the library of Dublin University (D.3.II), and is dated 20 June, 1631. It is full of inaccuracies, arising sometimes from indifference to spelling on the part of the transcriber, or to carelessness and inattention, but most frequently from ignorance of the numerous and perplexing contractions. The second has disappeared, probably on the day when Parliament ordered the Archbishop's books to be seized and confiscated (1643). Bishop Lightfoot has in part restored it by drawing attention to the collation of this Montacute MS., which occurs between the lines or in the margin of the Dublin transcript of the Caius MS. Archbishop Ussher's examination of the Latin version, thus discovered, induced in his mind a suspicion that Bishop Grosseteste was himself the translator. A marginal note, for example, betrayed the nationality of its author; 'Incus est instrumentum fabri; dicitur Anglice _anfeld_ [anvil].' Who so likely to have had the ability to translate from a Greek version as Robert Grosseteste, one of the very few Greek scholars of his age? Evidence is not wanting that the Ignatian Epistles were imported from Greece, and translated under the Bishop's direction by one or other of the Greek scholars who were with him: and it is significant, in connection with this point, that Tyssington and Wodeford belonged to the Franciscan Convent at Oxford to which Grosseteste left his books.