THE CHRISTIAN FATHERS. 91 



at least, for we find him preceeded by two others in 

 date, is Eusebius. 



The stores from which this writer drew his ma- 

 terials for his Ecclesiastical History, were scanty 

 and imperfect : the archives of the several Christian 

 churches, particularly that at Jerusalem, and the acts 

 of their martyrs, preserved with no ordinary care ; 

 these somewhat methodized in the writings of Heg:e- 

 sippus and Africanus, were all that lay open to his 

 research. 



He was followed, with more zeal in collecting, 

 than judgment in the discrimination, by Simeon 

 Metaphrastes, a compiler, whose legends have 

 mainly tended to the remark, that Laertius has re- 

 presented philosophy and its professors with more 

 fidelity, than many have the lives of the saints. It is 

 on what these have left — imperfect as are the frag- 

 ments that survive — that writers of later date have 

 been compelled to depend, for their annals of the 

 three first centuries of the church. These have been 

 collected and compiled—with an erudition in the 

 authors which makes us lament more deeply the sec- 

 tarian spirit under which they wrote — by Wigand 

 and others of the Lutheran and Baronius of the 

 Romish communion. 



The narrative left by Eusebius was resumed and 

 continued to A. D. 439, with singular accuracy 

 and fidelity, by Socrates, a scholiast of Constanti- 

 nople. Contemporary with him was Sozomen, an 

 advocate of Syriac extraction ; his work excels that 

 of Socrates in an agreeable style, in proportion as it 

 is inferior to the other in judgment. 



The defects of these annalists, more particularly 

 as regarded the Eastern Churches, were soon after 

 supplied by Theodoretus of Antioch; whose five 

 books on Ecclesiastical affairs and the Excerpta 

 made by Photius from the works of Philostorgius 

 the Arian, together with the histories of Sulpitius, 

 Nicephorus and a few others complete the serie's of 

 what is left to us. The later writers on the same 



