im to
have spoken and thought with the Anglican Church, and not with the Roman
Church on the invocation of saints and angels, and the blessed Virgin
Mary; and secondly, that whatever words Roman Catholics use, whether
stronger or not than these, these words on which the above questions are
put, never came forth from the pen of St. Athanasius. Their spuriousness
is not a question of doubt or difficulty. It has been shown in the text
that the whole homily has been for ages utterly repudiated, as a work
falsely attributed to St. Athanasius. It is indeed very disheartening to
those, whose object is the discovery and the establishment of the truth,
to find works cited in evidence as the genuine productions of primitive
Christian teachers, which have been so long ago, and so repeatedly, and
that not by members of another communion, but by the most learned men of
the Church of Rome, adjudged to be spurious. I do not mean that I think
it not fully competent for a writer of the present day to call in
question, and overrule and set aside the decisions of former editors, as
to the genuine or the spurious character of any work. On the contrary I
am persuaded that a field is open in that department of theology, which
would richly repay all the time and labour and expense, which persons
well qualified for the task could bestow upon its culture. What I lament
is this, that after a work has been deliberately condemned as
unquestionably {411} spurious, by competent and accredited judges for
two centuries and a half at the least, that very work should be now
cited as genuine and conclusive evidence, without any the most distant
allusion to the judgment which had condemned it, or even to any
suspicion of its being a forgery. In this instance, also, Dr. Wiseman
has implicitly followed the compilation of Messrs. Berington and Kirk.
This is evident, because the extract, as it stands word for word the
same in his Lectures and their compilation, is not found as one passage
in the spurious homily, but is made up of sentences selected from
different clauses, and put together so as to make one paragraph. It is
worthy of notice, that in quoting their authority, both Dr. Wiseman, and
those whom he follows, refer us to the very volume in which the
Benedictine editors declare that there was no learned man, who did not
pronounce the work to be spurious; and in which also they quote at
length the letter of Baronius which had proved it to be a forgery. [D