itive church more highly respected in his own days than St.
Epiphanius, for the purity of his life as well as the extent of his
leaning. He was master of five languages, and has left behind him one
of the most useful works which remain to us from antiquity. St. Jerom,
who personally knew him, calls him the father of all bishops, and a
shining star among them; the man of God of blessed memory; to whom the
people used to flock in crowds, offering their little children to his
benediction, kissing his feet, and catching the hem of his garment.
This holy man and light of the church, the great man of his day,
asserts upon his own knowledge, "that in imitation of our Saviour's
miracle at Cana in Galilee several fountains and rivers in his days
were annually turned into wine. A fountain at Cibyra, a city of Caria,
and another at Gerasa in Arabia, prove the truth of this. I myself have
drunk out of the fountain at Cibyra, and my brethren out of the other
at Gerasa; and many testify the same thing of the river Nile in Egypt."
Advers. Haeres, 1. 2, c. 130. Middleton's Inquiry, p. 151, 152] "All
the rest (Dr. Middleton goes on to say) were men of the same character,
who spent their lives and studies in propagating the faith, and in
combating the vices and the heresies of their times. Yet none of them
have scrupled, we see, to pledge their faith for the truth, of facts
which no man of sense can believe, and which their warmest admirers are
forced to give up as fabulous. If such persons then could willfully
attempt to deceive; and if the sanctity of their characters cannot
assure us of their fidelity, what better security can we have from
those who lived before them? Or what cure for our scepticism with
regard, to any of the miracles above mentioned? Was the first asserter
of them, Justin Martyr more pious, cautious, learned, judicious, or
less credulous than Epiphanius? Or were those virtues more conspicuous
in Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, Arnobius, and Lactantius, than in
Athanasius, Gregory, Chrysostom, Jerom, Austin? Nobody, I dare say,
will venture to affirm it. If these later fathers, then, biased by a
false zeal or interest, could be tempted to propagate a known lie, or
with all their learning and knowledge could be so weakly credulous as
to believe the absurd stories which they themselves attest, there must
be always reason to suspect, that the same prejudices would operate
even more strongly in the earlier fathers, prompted