160 E5 ES 1879 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. En sy OF EUSEBIUS PAMPHILUS, BISHOP OF CÆSAREA, IN PALESTINE. TRANSLATED FROM THE GREEK, BY THE REV. C. F. CRUSÉ, A.M. ASSISTANT PROFESSOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA. WITH NOTES SELECTED FROM THE EDITION OF VALESIUS. LONDON: GEORGE BELL AND SONS, YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN. 1879. NOTICE. THE Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, which succeeds immediately to the Acts of the Apostles, and is for a considerable period the only work of the kind, possesses a value to subsequent ages which belongs to no other uninspired document. As it furnishes the means of comparing modern with primitive times, and of viewing them in contrast with each other, its extensive circulation will, it is believed, tend to increase useful knowledge, promote soundness and unity of faith, advance the cause of the church, and maintain peace and quietness among all Christian people. In the confident opinion, that a general acquaintance with primitive Christianity will effect much for its cause, the present volume has been published in a popular form. THE PUBLISHER. PREFACE BY THE TRANSLATOR. WHEN the proposition was started to issue a new translation of the present work, the question no doubt frequently arose, Cui bono? Have we not ecclesiastical histories enough, and do not these give us all the information that we can reasonably expect, presented too in a form and style which is not likely to be surpassed by any age? Many may here have thought of the judicious and learned Mosheim, or of the popular Milner, some perhaps of the voluminous Schrockh, and Fleury,' whose researches into primitive ages have condensed the labours of their predecessors. Some, indeed, who, in distinct and separate works, have confined their histories to the first three centuries of the church, as Mosheim in his Commentary de Rebus Christianis ante Constantinum, Walchii Historia Ecclesiastica Novi Testamenti, and others of less note, might seem to preclude the necessity of any additional aids, or of recurring to the fountains whence they drew. But whatever be the superiority of modern ecclesiastical nistory, however justly it may represent the times recorded, it cannot give us the spirit of these times without the authors from which it is derived. It cannot, therefore, supersede the necessity of examining the same ground in the express statement of an original or primitive writer. It will not, therefore, be pronounced an indifference to the literature of our own time, when we hold up to view a production of ages long passed away. Every period has its distinctive features, its disadvantages as well as defects; ours may, without arrogance, claim the character of more systematic 1 Schrockh has written an Ecclesiastical History in forty-two octavo, and Fleury in thirty-seven quarto volumes; the former in German, the latter in French. precision in every department of learning. It has been reserved for this age, under Providence, by whose operations the human mind has attained an unprecedented expansion, to reduce the accumulated materials of the past to their correlative positions, to compress them into space that brings them more within our grasp, and by rejecting the superfluous, and digesting the essential, to enable us to traverse the vast ground of human attainment with pleasure and profit. The author, however, whose history is here presented to the English reader, in order to be duly estimated, must not be measured by a standard like this. To be appreciated, he must be measured by his own times. Neither are we to expect of him the condensed proportions, the judicious selections, and the comprehensive distribution of materials, that mark the productions of the scientific historian; nor was it the intention of our author. If we may be allowed to judge from the work itself, his object appears more like furnishing the materials, which the future historian should handle with a more masterly hand or a more enlarged view. The work, therefore, abounds with extracts from the writers that flourished in the early ages of the church, in which our author presents either a striking event, expressions of sentiments, or doctrine, to illustrate the religious aspect of times and places, and by the express testimony of another, perhaps often obviates the odium which would devolve upon his own narrative. Hence the history contains rather accounts of particular churches, than a history of the church generally, and is more like detached incidents scattered in memoirs of the individuals that successively rise and pass away before us. Our author, as the first that professedly entered the ground, has been justly called the father of ecclesiastical history. Priority gives him a just claim to the title. If his performance be examined by all the tests applicable to the scientific historians, this praise would indeed be awarded to a prominent name of modern date. But Eusebius is the first, and the only historian of the church bordering on primitive times. No just parallel therefore can be drawn between the Ecclesiastical History here translated, and the scientific labours of the present day. The business of the modern historian is to survey with comprehensive eye, to digest, to reduce to proper dimensions, and with a skilful hand to mould, |