Page:Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature (1911).djvu/11



volume is designed to render to a wider circle, alike of clergy and of laity, the service which, as is generally  admitted, has been rendered to the learned world by  The Dictionary of Christian Biography, Literature,  Sects, and Doctrines, published under the editorship of Dr. Wace and the late Dr. Wm. Smith, about twenty years ago, in four large volumes. That work covered the whole of the first eight centuries of the Christian era, and was planned on a very comprehensive scale. It aimed at giving an account, not merely of names of importance, but of all names, however small, concerned in the Christian literature of those eight centuries; and to illustrate its extent and minuteness, it may be enough to mention that no fewer than 596 Johns are recorded in due order in its columns. The surviving Editor may be pardoned for expressing his satisfaction that the work is now recognized, abroad as well as at home, as a valuable work of reference, being constantly quoted alike in the great Protestant Cyclopaedia of Herzog, in its third edition now happily complete, and in the Patrology of the learned Roman Catholic Professor at Munich, Dr. Bardenhewer. To the generous band of great English scholars to whose unstinted labours the chief excellences of that work are due, and too many of whom have now passed away, it is, or it would have been, a welcome satisfaction to find it described in the Patrology of that scholar as "very useful, relatively complete and generally reliable."

But that work was mainly adapted to the use of men of learning, and was unsuited, both by its size and expense, and by the very wideness of  its range, for the use of ordinary readers, or even for the clergy in general. In the first place, the last two centuries of the period which it covered, although of immense interest in the history of the Church, as including  the origins of the Teutonic civilization of Europe, have not an equal  interest with the first six as exhibiting primitive Christianity in its purer  forms. With the one important exception of John of Damascus, the Fathers of the Church, so called, alike in East and West, fall within the  first six centuries, and in the West the series is closed by St. Gregory the Great, who died in the year 604. English divines accordingly, since the days of Bp. Jewel, have, like Bp. Cosin, appealed to the first six centuries of the Church as exhibiting, in doctrine as well as in practice, subject to  Holy Scripture, the standards of primitive Christianity. Those six centuries, consequently, have a special interest for all Christian students, and