surnamed Pamphilus, bishop of Cesarea, the father of ecclesiastical history, was born about the year 264 A.D., towards the close of the reign of the Emperor Galienus. Of his youth nothing is known except that he was a most assiduous student, and probably held some inferior office in the Cesarean church. In the persecution set on foot against the Christians by Diocletian, Pamphilus, the bishop of that church, was imprisoned, and after two years' confinement suffered martyrdom. During the whole of this period he was tended with the most watchful care by Eusebius, who testified his affection for the old bishop among other ways by assuming his name. When all was over, Eusebius fled to Tyre, where he was kindly treated; and afterwards to Egypt, where he was thrown into prison. On procuring his release he returned to his native Cesarea, of which he was appointed bishop about the year 315. In the year 325 Eusebius attended the Council of Nice, and was appointed to deliver the address to the Emperor Constantine, and then to take his seat on his right hand. He took a leading share in the proceedings of this assembly, as may be inferred from the fact that he drew up the first draught of the Nicene Creed. The position of the Church at the time this council was convoked to deliberate upon it was embarrassed and complicated by the rise and spread of the Arian heresy, which, from certain inconsistent and self-contradictory passages in his previous works, Eusebius was believed to favour. His real views of the relation between the first two persons of the Trinity appear, so far as he has developed them, to coincide pretty much with those of Origen; but he neither went fully into the subject himself nor encouraged its discussion in others, believing it to lie beyond the pale of human cognizance. With this idea, he appeared at the Nicaean Council disposed to regard the case of Arius with the utmost tolerence, and not only so, but he even wrote a letter to Alexander of Alexandria, whose object was to vindicate the orthodoxy of Arius from his own writings, or, in the event of the worst, to save him from punishment for maintaining a doctrine to which, in his estimation, far too much importance was attached. Accordingly the draught of the creed which he prepared, and which was sanctioned by a moderate party in the council, was calculated to meet the views both of the Arian section of the assembly and their antagonists, whose most redoubtable champion was Athanasius. Arius accepted the creed as subsequently modified by the majority of the council, with the addition of the word consubstantial, on which Athanasius vehemently insisted. Eusebius at first refused to sign the draught of the creed as thus modified; but on the representations of Constantine agreed to do so, explaining, in a circular to his diocese, the grounds on which he did so. The deposition of Arius he strongly opposed, and, contrary to the opinion of Athanasius, used his efforts to have that heretic reinstated in his charge. Nor did he abate his intimacy with the chiefs of the Arian party in the church. One of its chief defenders was his own namesake, the bishop of Nicomedia. The sect which took its name from this prelate, and of which Eusebius Pamphili was a distinguished member, appears to have been actuated more by hostility to Athanasius than a desire to promulgate the tenets of Arius, who had himself submitted to the decrees of the Council of Nicea. In the Council of Tyre, Eusebius joined in the outcry against Athanasius, who was deposed for alleged disobedience to the emperor, disrespect to the council, &c.; and he even seems to have used his influence with Constantine to secure the banishment of that father. Some of the personal traits in the character of Eusebius are interesting. He had an intense hatred of the pictures and images of Christ, the use of which were then beginning to creep into the church; and on one occasion, when requested by the sister of Constantine to send her one of the pictures in question, he not only refused, but denounced in the strongest language the use of such adjuncts of worship, as savouring of heathenism. Another point on which he held equally strong opinions was the impropriety of transferring ecclesiastical officers from one sphere of labour to another, and exemplified the sincerity of his convictions on this point by refusing the see of Antioch, which he was repeatedly pressed to exchange for his own. His modesty was duly appreciated by his imperial patron, who declared Eusebius worthy to be bishop of the whole world. Eusebius died about the year 340, at the age of seventy-six. Apart from the many strictures which subsequent writers have passed upon the orthodoxy of Eusebius, his fidelity as an historian has been impugned by Gibbon, who describes Eusebius himself as a mean sycophant, living on the breath of his imperial patron. The charge of sycophancy is one to which Eusebius is obnoxious in common with nearly the whole Christian world of that time. Under Constantine the Christians were not only secured against the persecutions to which they had hitherto been exposed, but had the satisfaction of seeing their religion established as that of the state. It is no wonder, then, that they should have been rather extravagant in demonstrating their gratitude for so remarkable a change, and ascribing to Constantine praises which were not the right of any mortal. The graver charge of historical fidelity is one which has been alleged against Eusebius by Gibbon alone, and is based only on a confession of the historian himself, that in his account of the early Christian church he suppressed allusion to the strifes and dissensions which occasionally broke out; believing the narration of such incidents less edifying than the stories of the martyrs whose lives and deaths were alike honourable to themselves and the religion they professed. From his avowed adoption of this principle, his history may be defective, but it is not therefore necessarily dishonest.

Of Eusebius' works the most important are the following:— 1. The Ecclesiastical History, in ten books; comprising the history of the church from the ascension of Christ to the defeat and death of Licinius, A.D. 324. 2. The Chronicon, in two books; comprising a historical sketch, with chronological tables, of the most important events in the history of the world from the days of Abraham till the twentieth year of the reign of Constantine. This work, which is the only authentic history of the first centuries, was published in its complete form for the first time by Mai and Zohrab at Milan in 1818. 3. The Preparatio Evangelica, in fifteen books; a collection of facts and quotations from the works of nearly all the philosophers of antiquity, intended to prepare the reader's mind for the acceptance of the Christian evidences. 4. The Demonstratio Evangelica, a learned and valuable treatise on the evidences them-