of fabulous nonsense; and in this case, as in others already alluded to, the writings of the monks of the fourteenth century, produce long accounts of Matthew's labors in Ethiopia, where he is carried through a long series of fabled miracles, to the usual crowning glory of martyrdom.
Ethiopia.—The earliest testimony on this point by any ecclesiastical history, is that
of Socrates, (A. D. 425,) a Greek writer, who says only, that "when the apostles divided
the heathen world, by lot, among themselves,—to Matthew was allotted Ethiopia."
This is commonly supposed to mean Nubia, or the country directly south of
Egypt. The other Fathers of the fifth and following centuries, generally assign him
the same country; but it is quite uncertain what region is designated by this name.
Ethiopia was a name applied by the Greeks to such a variety of regions, that it is
quite in vain to define the particular one meant, without more information about the
locality.
But no such idle inventions can add anything to the interest
which this apostolic writer has secured for himself by his noble
Christian record. Not even an authentic history of miracles and
martyrdom, could increase his enduring greatness. The tax-gatherer
of Galilee has left a monument, on which cluster the
combined honors of a literary and a holy fame,—a monument which
insures him a wider, more lasting, and far higher glory, than the
noblest achievments of the Grecian or the Latin writers, in his or
any age could acquire for them. Not Herodotus nor Livy,—not
Demosthenes nor Cicero,—not Homer nor Virgil,—can find a reader
to whom the despised Matthew's simple work is not familiar; nor
did the highest hope or the proudest conception of the brilliant
Horace, when exulting in the extent and durability of his fame,
equal the boundless and eternal range of Matthew's honors. What
would Horace have said, if he had been told that among the most
despised of these superstitious and barbarian Jews, whom his own
writings show to have been proverbially scorned, would arise one,
within thirty or forty years, who, degraded by his avocation, even
below his own countrymen's standard of respectability, would,
by a simple record in humble prose, in an uncultivated and soon-forgotten
dialect, "complete a monument more enduring than
brass,—more lofty than the pyramids,—outlasting all the storms
of revolution and of disaster,—all the course of ages and the flight
of time?" Yet such was the result of the unpretending effort of
Matthew; and it is not the least among the miracles of the religion
whose foundation he commemorated and secured, that such a
wonder in fame should have been achieved by it.
