Section 31
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PREFACE BY THE TRANSLATOR. WHEN the proposition was started, to issue a new translation of the present work, the question no doubt frequently arose, Cm 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 sur passed by any age? Many may here have thought of the judi cious and learned Mosheim, or of the popular Milner, some per haps of the voluminous Schroeckh, and Fleury,* whose researches into primitive ages have condensed the labours of their predeces sors. Some, indeed, who, in distinct and separate works, have confined their histories to the three first centuries of the church, as Mosheim in his Commentary de Rebus Christianis ante Constantinum, Walchii Historia Ecclesiastica Novi Testamenti, and others of less notoriety, 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 history, 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 supe rior literature of our own age, when we hold up to view a produc tion of ages long passed away. Every age has its distinctive features, its advantages as well as defects ; ours may, without arro gance, claim the character of more systematic precision in every de partment 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 * Schroeckh has written an Ecclesiastical History in forty-two octavo, and Fleurjr in twenty quarto volumes ; the former in German, the latter in French. 8 XXV