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? It is plain that the mistake or corruption of a word in the postscript of the Epistle of Polycarp has had much to do with this Ignatian imposture. In some worn or badly written manuscript, Syria was perhaps read instead of Smyrna, and the false reading probably led to the incubation of the whole brood of Ignatian letters. The error, whether of accident or design, was adopted by Eusebius, [411:1] and from him passed into general currency. We may thus best account for the strange multiplication of these Ignatian epistles. It was clear that the Ignatius spoken of by Polycarp had written more letters than what first appeared, [411:2] and thus the epistles to the Smyrnaeans, the Magnesians, the Trallians, and the Philadelphians, in due time emerged into notice. At a subsequent date the letters to the Philippians, the Antiochians, the Virgin Mary, and others, were forthcoming.