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

Of the second letter to Janus Vliet.

PREFACE.

Regarding the two treatises on prayer for the dead and the Invocation of saints, D. Morley puts forward two digressions. One about the place from which the light of the Gospel was first brought into Britain. The other about the British war-chariots and carriages. I should not have omitted these entirely, because he says various things in passing that conflict with the truth; nor should I have pursued them at length, because they are digressions, alien to the matter that both parties primarily intend. I say this so that the benevolent reader may see that I did not stray from the boundaries of the controversy proposed to us of my own accord. For I have followed the leader who went before, even if he strayed off the path, in order to lead him back into the path of truth, convinced of his errors, so that he may conceive of a salutary humility, having laid aside the native arrogance of heresy.

SECTION III.

The British error in celebrating Easter does not prove they received the faith from the Asiatics.

D. Morley, p. 7: It is more than likely that the Britons first received the rudiments of the Christian Religion from the Asiatics; because Augustine, sent by Gregory I to preach the Gospel to the Saxons, found the ancient inhabitants of the island already Christian, and most observant of the Oriental custom in celebrating Easter; nor could he persuade them to the contrary practice of the Roman Church with any threats or promises. And this seems to me to be an apodictic demonstratively certain argument that we owe our first instruction in the Christian faith not to the Romans (as they boast, and from there claim to vend the right and jurisdiction of the Roman Church over us), but to the Apostles or one of the apostolic men, who, along with the Catholic faith, taught here the rites used in those places from which he had come.