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THE

4341

Book of the Fathers;

CONTAINING

THE LIVES

OF CELEBRATED

Fathers of the Christian Church.

AND THE

SPIRIT OF THEIR WRITINGS.

"It is the peculiar property of the Fathers to give, every now and then, compendiums
of religious truth, at once the briefest and most luminous. . . . . . When they treat of
piety itself, of the substantial life of the inner man, they rise above all, except the
sacred writers."
ALEXANDER KNOX.

LONDON:

JOHN W. PARKER, WEST STRAND.

M.DCCC.XXXVII.

DIVINITY SCHOOL

LIBRARY.

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

LONDON:

JOHN W. PARKER, ST. MARTIN'S LANE.

PREFACE.

THE following pages aspire not to the character of learning, and disclaim that of theological discussion; their object is to give the general reader a concise idea of the characteristic excellences of the eminent Christians whose lives they relate, and whose writings, in the present day, are accessible to few, except the scholar or the divine. The rich mines whence the gems of deep thought and pious feeling, which will be found in the Selections, are extracted, have been explored chiefly in the libraries of Geneva and Lausanne; noble repositories of biblical and ecclesiastical literature; of the most valuable productions of the Protestant Churches, as well as of those of the most enlightened members of the Church of Rome. Among the latter, it would be alike ungrateful and unjust in the Author, not to particularize the Bibliothèque choisie des Pères de L'Eglise Grecque et Latine, by the Abbé Guillon, a splendid monument of the learned labour of thirty years, in the studies connected with his sacred calling; the spirited touches of Villemain have also occasionally lent their animation to the theme; and two or three passages from Gregory Nazianzen have been borrowed from the elegant translations of Mr. Boyd.

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