Section 32
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XXVI PREFACE. 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 mea sured 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 com prehensive distribution of materials, that mark the productions of the scientific historian ; nor was it the intention of our author. llf we may be allowed to judge from the work itself, his object appears more like furnishing the materials, which himself or the future historian should handle with a more masterly hand or a more enlarged view. The work, therefore, abounds with ex tracts from the writers that flourished in the early ages of the church, in which our author presents either a striking event, ex pressions of sentiments or doctrine, to illustrate the religious as pect of times and places, and by the express testimony of another, perhaps often obviates the odium which would devolve upon his own narrative7J[Hence the history contains rather accounts of particular churches, than a history of the church generally, and is more like detached incideinis^ scattered in memoirs of the individualsjhat successively rise and pass away before us.^j T)ur author, as the first tnat 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, which would be applied 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, his materials into the form of pleasing yet faithful narration ; that of the primitive historian, was rather to trans