A Revision of Two Letters from George Morley, Bishop of Winchester, to Jan van Vliet

at least some estimation of meter existed. Moreover, I do not have him with me, nor is the difficulty such that it would be worth the effort to go search for him through the libraries of others. You see, most learned Morley, that your first impression has succeeded poorly: that your arguments prove nothing: and thus that the book of Meditations could be a genuine offspring of Augustine, unless something else stood in the way.

But what you attempted to extort from us in vain, that we grant you freely: that the book is not by Augustine. For the author says some things about himself that do not fit Augustine. Namely, in ch. 31, he says: His faith had been illuminated from his very cradle, always through the illustration of Divine grace. And in ch. 41, he says he committed grave sins after Baptism. These could not have been said by Augustine about himself, who wallowed long in the filth of the Manichaeans a dualist religious sect before his Baptism (which he received as an adult), and after it, always lived most piously.

SECTION II.

On the Invocation of Saints.

D. Morley, p. 5: The author of this book has patched together many things from Augustine, to which he has added much of his own, and among other things, those formulas for invoking the Saints. Since these have no foundation in Holy Scripture, nor an example in the practice of the ancient and as yet uncorrupted Church, the patcher of those Meditations, to serve the superstitious spirit of his time, abused the name and authority of Augustine; he should have said "has abused."

Response: On whose authority do you say this? On none. On whose witness? On your own. With what confidence do you assert such things about him (which concern the secret inner workings of the heart), whom you neither know by face nor by name, nor can you say in what place or in what century he lived? I truly believe the author of the Meditations was a pious man (which the book itself confirms), who pours out in it his innermost feelings of soul before God, provoked to this by the example of Augustine, whose Confessions he read not without diligence, from which he wove some rags—