A large decorative woodcut headpiece at the top of the page. It features a central urn containing a large bouquet of flowers and leaves. The urn is flanked by symmetrical, ornate scrolling acanthus leaves and various blossoms, filling the width of the text block.

I. N. I. A. An abbreviation for "In Nomine Iesu Amen" (In the Name of Jesus, Amen).

PROLOGUE.

A decorative woodcut initial "C" at the beginning of the first paragraph. The letter is set within a square frame and contains a floral motif inside its bowl.

The most renowned William Cave original: "Caveum", an ornament no less of England than of the entire learned world, in his History of Ecclesiastical Writers, Part I, p. 177 (London edition), holds in great admiration that men otherwise not undistinguished by a common knowledge of ecclesiastical matters, such as Natalis Alexander, Emanuel Schelstrate, and others, allowed themselves to be carried away by such blindness of mind and eyes in defending and still selling as genuine those writings which circulate under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite; since many of the learned, and especially Daille in an entire book published at Geneva in 1666, have long since demonstrated their spurious authority more than enough. And without a doubt, the same wonder would have seized my own mind when, a few days ago, I happened upon the Church and Heretic History original: "Kirchen- u. Ketzer-Historie"—as he calls it—of Gottfried Arnold, and discovered the same man to be blind in this midday light and willfully ignorant; if I had not been fully persuaded that he had long ago offered himself up to be mocked by men of sounder mind and lovers of truth, out of a mere lust for contradicting and as a sworn enemy—albeit one of very light armor due to the straw-like arguments upon which he primarily relies—of the truth in this Diabolical Work. Therefore, when some subject for an Academic Dissertation had to be chosen, it pleased me to call the "fig-tree" A biblical reference to fruitless, deceptive arguments; Matthew 21:19. reasons of Arnold—which he brings forward to defend this old and often exploded opinion, lest he seem to have said nothing or asserted something for nothing—to examination in a few words, and to prefix a brief history of Dionysius the Areopagite and the struggles moved among the learned regarding the writings falsely attributed to him. May GOD grant success!