In answer to these questions I reply with sure and certain confidence, first, that the genuine words of St. Athanasius himself prove him 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. [Dr. Wiseman’s Lectures, vol. ii. p. 108, from Berington and Kirk, p. 430, 431.]

Note.—­Page 231. (Decree of the Council of Trent.) [Canones et Decreta Sacros.  OEcumen. et Genera.  Concilii Tridentini, &c.  Rom. fol.  A.D. 1564.]