something highly significant in this coincidence. Was it Adrian himself who authorized this work of forgery?
the collection or Dionysius. He added the canons of some national or provincial councils of Africa, Spain, and France, and some letters of a few of the Popes, going back no further than to Damasus, who died in 384, and was the predecessor of Siricius. This collection of Isidore of Seville begins with the canons of the Council of Nicea. He used the old translation, and not that of Dionysius for the Greek canons.
His collection was but little known, and in history we do not meet it until 785, and then disfigured and interpolated by an unknown forger, giving his name as Isidore Mercator. This collection contained, beside the pieces contained in the collection of Isidore of Seville, certain Decretals which he ascribed to the Popes of the first three centuries. Several scholars make Isidore Mercator and Isidore of Seville separate writers, while others think that the latter had added, through humility, the word Peccator to his name, which was corrupted to Mercator. However this may be, the best Ultramontane critics as well as the Gallicans, agree that the Decretals ascribed to the Popes of the first centuries in the collection of Isidore Mercator, are spurious. Marchetti himself admits their spuriousness. "Learned men of great piety," he adds, "have declared against this false collection, which Cardinal Bona frankly calls a pious fraud." "Baronius does not as frankly regard them as a fraud; nevertheless, he would not use them in his Ecclesiastical Annals, lest it should be believed that the Roman Church needed suspicious documents to establish her rights."
The Ultraraontanes cannot openly sustain these Decretals as true, for it has been abundantly proved that they were manufactured partly from ancient canons, with extracts from the letters of the Popes of the fourth and fifth centuries. Entire passages, particularly from St. Leo and Gregory the Great, are found in them. The whole is strung together in bad Latin, which for even the least critical scholar has all the characteristics of the style of the eighth and ninth centuries.
The collection of Isidore Mercator was disseminated chiefly by Riculf, Archbishop of Mayence, who took that see in 787. Several critics have concluded from this that this collection first appeared at Mayence, and even that Riculf was its author.
Were these False Decretals fabricated in Spain, Germany, or Rome? We have no certainty on the subject. The oldest copies tell us that it was Ingelramn who brought this collection to Rome from Metz, when he had a lawsuit there in 785; but other copies tell us that it was Pope Adrian who, upon that occasion, delivered it to Ingelramn, September nineteenth, A.D. 785. Certain it is, that at Rome we find the first mention of it. Yet Adrian knew that these Decretals were false, since, ten years before, he had given Charlemagne a copy of the canons, which was no other than that of Dionysius Exiguus.
The False Decretals were so extensively circulated in the West, that they were everywhere received, and particularly at Rome, as authentic.
The Ultramontanes, while they do not dare to maintain the authority of the writings ascribed to the Popes of the first three centuries, nevertheless indirectly sustain them. Several works have been written with this object against Fleury, who justly asserted and abundantly proved that they changed the ancient discipline. We will quote among these Ultramontane works those of Marchetti, of Father de Housta, and Father Honoré de Sainte-Marie:
"We may conjecture," says Marchetti, "that Isidore gathered the Decretals of ancient Popes which the persecutions of the first centuries had not permitted to be collected, and that animated by a desire to transmit the collection to posterity, he
