Section 26
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LIFE OF EUSEBIUS. xix and having also detailed an account of the successive heresies and persecutions, he was, as it were, led by insensible degrees to write a history specially on ecclesiastic affairs, to furnish a full developement of what had been but briefly sketched in his Chronological Canons. This, indeed, is expressly confirmed by Eusebius in his preface* to that work ; where he also implores the forbearance of the candid reader, on account of his work being less circumstantial, consequent on his travelling in a path before untrod, and his being precluded from the intimations on that subject of any previous writer. Though this, it is true, in the view of some, may appear not so much an apology, as an indirect device of acquiring praise. Though it is evident from Eusebius's own testimony, that he wrote his Ecclesiastic History, after his Chronological Canons, it is re markable that the twentie^l^eaj^j)£C^pjist^ to both those works. Nor is it less singular, that, thoughjhe Nicene C ounciljwasjie.ld in that year,! yet no n^yit^n i« mufl^ot itin either" work. But in his Chronicle, at the fifteenth year of Constantine, we read that " Alexander is ordained the nineteenth bishop of the Alex andrian church, by whom Arius the presbyter being expelled, joins many to his own impiety. A synod, therefore, of three hundred and eighteen bishops, is convened at Nice, a city of Bithynia, who by their agreement on the term '0^00^105, (consubstantial, or co-essential) suppressed all the devices of the heretics." It is sufficiently evident that these words were not written by Eusebius, but by St. Jerome, who in Eusebius's Chronicle inserted many passages of his own. For, not to mention that this reference to the Nicene Council is inserted in a place with which it has no proper connexion, who could believe that Eusebius would thus write concerning Arius, or should have in serted the term '^^^^ in his own Chronicle ; which word, as we shall hereafter state, was not satisfactory to him. Was it likely that Eusebius should, in the Chronicle, state that three hundred and eigh teen bishops were present at the Nicene synod, and in his Third§ Book on the Life of Constantine, say expressly that something more than two hundred and fifty sat in that council ? We doubt not, how ever, that the Ecclesiastical History was not completely finished by Eusebius till some years after the council at Nice. As Dionysius of * Book 1. chap. 1. f i. e. A. D. 325. $ On Constantino's Vicennalia, that is, on the twentieth year of his empire. § Chap. 8. C