other. Some writers
contended for the genuineness of the shorter epistles, and represented
the larger as made up of the true text extended by interpolations;
whilst others pronounced the larger letters the originals, and condemned
the shorter as unsatisfactory abridgments. [395:1] But, though both
editions found most erudite and zealous advocates, many critics of
eminent ability continued to look with distrust upon the text, as well
of the shorter, as of the larger letters; whilst not a few were disposed
to suspect that Ignatius had no share whatever in the composition of any
of these documents.

In the year 1845 a new turn was given to this controversy by the
publication of a Syriac version of three of the Ignatian letters. They
were printed from a manuscript deposited in 1843 in the British Museum,
and obtained, shortly before, from a monastery in the desert of Nitria
in Egypt. The work was dedicated by permission to the Archbishop of
Canterbury, and the views propounded in it were understood to have the
sanction of the English metropolitan. [395:2] Dr Cureton, the editor,
has since entered more fully into the discussion of the subject in his
"Corpus Ignatianum" [395:3]--a volume dedicated to His Royal Highness
the Prince Albert, in which the various texts of all the epistles are
exhibited, and in which the claims of the three recently discovered
letters, as the only genuine productions of Ignatius, are ingeniously
maintained. In the Syriac copies, [396:1] these letters are styled "_The
Three_ Epistles of Ignatius, Bishop, and Martyr," and thus the inference
is suggested that, at one time, they were _the only three_ epistles in
existence. Dr Cureton's statements have obviously made a great
impression upon the mind of the literary public, and there seems at
present to be a pretty general disposition in certain quarters [396:2]
to discard all the other epistles as forgeries, and to accept those
preserved in the Syriac version as the veritable compositions of the
pastor of Antioch.

It must be obvious from the foregoing explanations that increasing light
has wonderfully diminished the amount of literature which once obtained
credit under the name of the venerable Ignatius. In the sixteenth
century he was reputed by many as the author of fifteen letters: it was
subsequently discovered that eight of them must be set aside as
apocryphal: farther investigation convinced critics that considerable
portions of the remaining s