AN ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY OF GREAT BRITAIN, Chiefly of England, FROM THE FIRST PLANTING OF CHRISTIANITY, TO THE END of THE REIGN OF KING CHARLES THE SECOND; WITH A BRIEF ACCOUNT OF THE AFFAIRS OF RELIGION IN IRELAND. COLLECTED FROM THE BEST ANCIENT HISTORIANS, COUNCILS, AND RECORDS, BY JEREMY COLLIER, M.A. NEW EDITION, WITH A LIFE OF THE AUTHOR, THE CONTROVERSIAL TRACTS CONNECTED WITH THE HISTORY, NOTES, AND AN ENLARGED INDEX, BY FRANCIS BARHAM, ESQ. Pickering 5-4-29 PREFACE TO THIS NEW EDITION OF COLLIER'S ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY. CALLED on to prepare a new edition of Jeremy Collier's Ecclesiastical History, its editor is conscious that he is undertaking a task of great national interest. It is this reflection which tends to sweeten the severe and scrupulous toil of correcting the press, which might otherwise seem harsh and ungenial. Of all labours, the labor lima, the labor ineptiarum, the labor de minimis, which fall to an editor's share, are at first sight the least fascinating or stimulating. But when he has the happiness to know that the work on which he expends his solicitude is essentially a noble work, when he remembers that it is a work which illustrates and ornaments its age and country, then he indulges a more cheery estimate of his literary undertaking; he elicits a delight from the very arduousness of the enterprise-the danger's self becomes his lure and excitement. There is a natural and prompt alacrity which he finds in hardness," and his conclusion is satisfactorily summed up in the Latin paradox, "labor ipse voluptas." Such, at this moment, is the sentiment predominant in the editor of the present work. He regards it with a deep rever |