conclusion, prevented the consideration of the question on its true merits:-- '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.'