tain the passages to which we have before referred as
fixing the belief of the Church of Rome to be in the CORPOREAL
assumption of Mary. "Quomodo corruptio invaderet CORPUS ILLUD in
quo vita suscepta est? [Greek: pos diaphthora tou zoodochon
katatolmaeseie somatos.]"]

This, then, is the account nearest to the time of the supposed event;
and yet can any thing be more vague, and by way of testimony, more
worthless? A writer near the middle of the sixth century refers to a
conversation, said to have taken place in the middle of the fifth
century; in this reported conversation at Constantinople, the Bishop of
Jerusalem is represented to have informed the Emperor and Empress of an
ancient tradition, which was believed, concerning a miraculous event,
said to have taken place nearly four hundred years before, that the body
was taken out of a coffin without the knowledge of those who had
deposited it there: Whilst the primitive and inspired account, recording
most minutely the journeys and proceedings of some of those very
persons, and the letters of others, makes no mention at all of any
transaction of the kind; and of {315} all the intermediate historians
and ecclesiastical writers not one gives the slightest intimation that
any rumour of it had reached them[119].

[Footnote 119: Baronius appears not to have referred to this
history of Euthymius, but he refers to Nicephorus, and also to a
work ascribed to Melito, c. 4, 5. Nicephorus, Paris, 1630. vol.
i. p. 168. lib. ii. c. 21. Baronius also refers to lib. 15. c.
14. This Nicephorus was Patriarch of Constantinople. He lived
during the reign of our Edward the First, or Edward the Second,
and cannot, therefore, be cited in any sense of the word as an
ancient author writing on the events of the primitive ages;
though the manner in which his testimony is appealed to would
imply, that he was a man to whose authority on early
ecclesiastical affairs we were now expected to defer.]

Another authority to which the writers on the assumption of the Virgin
appeal, is that of Nicephorus Callistus, who, at the end of the
thirteenth or the beginning of the fourteenth century, dedicated his
work to Andronicus Palaeologus. The account given by Nicephorus is this:

In the fifth year of Claudius, the Virgin at the age of fifty-nine, was
made acquainted with her approaching death. Christ himself then
descended from heaven with a co