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

into his own work. Such as that in ch. 33: Man, a great portion of your creation, praises you. Augustine had said in Confessions, book 1, ch. 1: Man, some portion of your creation, wishes to praise you. Others will be brought forward below. However, I do not believe the author gave himself the name of Augustine or assumed his persona; otherwise he would have set the stage better, and would not have said things about himself that he could not have been ignorant were alien to Augustine. Whence I suspect the name of the great Doctor was attached to it by someone else, and in good faith, because he saw that this book agreed in not a few things with other undoubted works of the same holy Doctor. Nor is it a wonder that men of refined taste did not smell what was hidden, which was evident neither to Bellarmine nor to Erasmus, neither of whom rejects the work from Augustine.

But you are mistaken, if I may say so with your permission, when you say that the Invocation of Saints has no foundation in Holy Scripture, nor an example in the practice of the ancient Church. We shall say that both are most false, in response to your second letter, in which you seriously attack us, whereas in this one you only seem to be skirmishing or playing. For the present, it is enough that we say that the living saints were invoked in Holy Scripture. Whence it follows that the dead saints are also to be invoked. And that the ancient Church invoked the holy martyrs, whence the opportunity was given to the heathens to reproach the Christians, because the Christians transferred to the martyrs the worship that they [the heathens] showed to their own gods. Add that there is no ancient Liturgy in which the Saints are not invoked. This in passing.

D. Morley, p. 6.

I do not deny that in the very age of Augustine the seeds of this superstition were sown and began to sprout. But I deny that Augustine was in that error, or that such formulas of invoking saints were commonly received or publicly used in the Church of Augustine’s time.

Response: Why do you doubt that the seeds sown were beginning to sprout, when a vast harvest filling the field of the entire Church appears? The prophets sowed it, the Apostles watered it, and God, testifying by various miracles that it was pleasing to Him, gave the increase. Paul the Deacon, a man not at all superstitious, reports that Theodore, brother of the Emperor Heraclius, destroyed a huge multitude of barbarians with a small band by God's decree through the intercession of the Blessed Virgin.

These seem superstitious to you, and you think those who fostered them were in error.