Excerpt from Lives of the Fathers, Vol. 1: Sketches of Church History in Biography IN the following volumes it is not my Object to write a full and continuous history of the early Church. I aim rather at connecting the history of the Church during the first four centuries with the lives of her principal Fathers and Teachers.1 The interest which attaches to the human and personal element of bio graphy - which Carlyle called the most universally pleasant and profitable of all reading - is to a certain extent separable from the religious history, and yet is so closely connected with it that biography and history serve the purpose of mutual illustration. Any one who is familiar with the lives of the chief Church writers will scarcely be ignorant of any event of capital importance which occurred during the epoch in which they lived. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.