PREFACE.

This volume contains the following works:

I. Theodoret, Church History, translated, with full notes and explanatory notes, by the Rev. Blomfield Jackson, M.A., Vicar of St. Bartholomew’s, Cripplegate, London.

II. Jerome and Gennadius: Lives of Illustrious Men. Translated with introduction and notes by Ernest Cushing Richardson, Ph.D., Librarian of Princeton College.

III. Rufinus: Apology against Jerome, his Apology addressed to Pope Anastasius, the Commentary on the Apostles' Creed, his History of the Monks, and the Prefaces to the History of Origen’s First Principles, to the Sentences of Sextus, and to his translation of the Church History of Eusebius, translated with notes and an introduction on the Life and Works of Rufinus by the Hon. and Rev. W. H. Fremantle, M.A., Canon of Canterbury.

The English reader now has, in the first three volumes of this Library, a complete collection of the historical writings of the century, whose permanent value as sources is universally acknowledged; several of them have never before appeared in English.

The unavoidable delay in the publication of this third volume has been very annoying to the editors and publishers, but the subscribers will be amply compensated by the addition of the writings of Rufinus which were not promised in the prospectus.

It is encouraging that this difficult and costly enterprise is finding so much support, as expressed on both sides of the Atlantic. It is especially gratifying and significant that, though partial scholars of the Anglican Church have a special interest in the translation of the Fathers, the work of two young American scholars, as appeared in the first and fourth volumes (of the Second Series), should find in this series its first complete and critical edition of all the historical works of St. Jerome. The publishers will therefore find it possible to maintain the expense of publication, while the model set by Bishop Lightfoot in his Apostolic Fathers is kept in view, and it is to be hoped that the volume of the Works of St. Jerome will soon follow.

New York, May 1892.