Scholars revealing them were frowned upon, even persecuted,
and their works placed upon the Index; scholars explaining them
away--the "apologists" or "reconcilers" of that day--were rewarded with
Church preferment, one of them securing for a very feeble treatise
a cardinal's hat. But all in vain; these writings were at length
acknowledged by all scholars of note, Catholic and Protestant, to be
mainly a mass of devoutly cunning forgeries.

While the eyes of scholars were thus opened as never before to the skill
of early Church zealots in forging documents useful to ecclesiasticism,
another discovery revealed their equal skill in forging documents useful
to theology.

For more than a thousand years great stress had been laid by theologians
upon the writings ascribed to Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian
convert of St. Paul. Claiming to come from one so near the great
apostle, they were prized as a most precious supplement to Holy Writ.
A belief was developed that when St. Paul had returned to earth,
after having been "caught up to the third heaven," he had revealed to
Dionysius the things he had seen. Hence it was that the varied pictures
given in these writings of the heavenly hierarchy and the angelic
ministers of the Almighty took strong hold upon the imagination of the
universal Church: their theological statements sank deeply into
the hearts and minds of the Mystics of the twelfth century and the
Platonists of the fifteenth; and the ten epistles they contained,
addressed to St. John, to Titus, to Polycarp, and others of the earliest
period, were considered treasures of sacred history. An Emperor of
the East had sent these writings to an Emperor of the West as the most
precious of imperial gifts. Scotus Erigena had translated them; St.
Thomas Aquinas had expounded them; Dante had glorified them; Albert
the Great had claimed that they were virtually given by St. Paul and
inspired by the Holy Ghost. Their authenticity was taken for granted by
fathers, doctors, popes, councils, and the universal Church.

But now, in the glow of the Renascence, all this treasure was found to
be but dross. Investigators in the old Church and in the new joined in
proving that the great mass of it was spurious.

To say nothing of other evidences, it failed to stand the simplest of
all tests, for these writings constantly presupposed institutions and
referred to events of much later date than the time of Dionysius; they
were at lengt