Entered according to act of Congress in the year one thousand eight hundred and thirty-six,

By CAREY, LEA, AND BLANCHARD,

in the Clerk's office of the District Court of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.

PREFACE.

THE first volume of this work appeared in Germany in 1824, and passed through three editions, 1824, 1827, 1831, before the completion of the second volume, in 1835. The cause of this great, for such a work probably unprecedented success, is no doubt mainly the peculiar plan on which it is constructed. It will be seen by a glance at the main body of the work, that by far the greatest part of it consists of extracts from the original sources; the text itself, though containing a complete view of the whole field of Church History, being exceedingly compressed. The advantages of such a plan for a manual of this study will at once be manifest. On the one hand, the student does not wish to be encumbered with long disquisitions on subjects so hard and dry as for the most part here are treated of, and on the other it is important that he should have the means of investigating them on occasion; whilst frequently the points involved are so refined and delicate that the mistranslation of a word, or even the substitution of one language for another, may essentially modify the idea. Το use the author's own words in his Preface to the original edition of the work; "It is no where more true than in Church History, that it is impossible rightly to understand an age gone by, without allowing it to speak for itself; the subjects involved in this study being often such as are least easily rendered into a foreign language."