principles of Montanism had been held by a man of the apostolic era.  Nor can it be said that had the letter then been in existence, it was likely to have escaped his observation.  He had lived for years in Rome, and we have good reason to believe that he was a presbyter of the Church of the Imperial city.  A man of his inquiring spirit, and literary habits, must have been well acquainted with the Epistle had it obtained currency in Italy.  But in not one of his numerous treatises does he ever speak of it, or even name its alleged author. [409:1] Hippolytus of Portus is another writer who might have been expected to know something of this production.  He lived within a few miles of Rome, and he was conversant with the history of its Church and with its ecclesiastical memorials.  He, as well as Tertullian, could have sympathised with the rugged and ascetic spirit pervading the Ignatian correspondence.  But, even in his treatise against all heresies, he has not fortified his arguments by any testimony from these letters.  He had evidently never heard, of the now far famed documents. [409:2]

The conclusion to be drawn from these facts must be sufficiently obvious.  The Ignatian Epistles began to be fabricated in the time of Origen; and the first edition of them appeared, not at Troas or Smyrna, but in Syria or Palestine.  At an early period festivals were kept in honour of the martyrs; and on his natal day, [409:3] why should not the Church of Antioch have something to tell of her great Ignatius?  The Acts of his Martyrdom were probably written in the former part of the third century—­a time when the work of ecclesiastical forgery was rife [409:4]—­and the Epistle to the Romans, which is inserted in these Acts, is in all likelihood of earlier date than any of the other letters.  The Epistle to the Ephesians, perhaps, next made its appearance, and then followed the Epistle to Polycarp.  These letters gradually crept into circulation as “The Three Epistles of Ignatius, Bishop, and Martyr.”  There is every reason to believe that, as edited by Dr Cureton, they are now presented to the public in their original language, as well as in their original form.  Copies of these short letters are not known to be extant in any manuscript either Greek or Latin.  Dr Cureton has not attempted any explanation of this emphatic fact.  If the Epistle to the Romans, in its newly discovered form, is genuine, how does it happen that there are no previous traces of its existence in the Western Church?  How are we to account for the extraordinary circumstance that the Church of Rome can produce no copy of it in either Greek or Latin?  She had every reason to preserve such a document had it ever come into her possession; for, even considered as a pious fraud of the third century, the address “to her who sitteth at the head in the place of the country of the Romans,” [410:1] is one of the most ancient testimonies to her early pre-eminence to be found in the whole range of ecclesiastical literature.  Why should she have permitted it to be supplanted by an interpolated document?  Can any man, who adopts the views of Dr Cureton, fairly answer such an inquiry?