heard: and thus with divine and more than heavenly glory, she delivered
her holy soul into the hands of God in an unspeakable manner. But that
which had conceived God being borne with angelic and apostolic psalmody,
with funeral rites, was deposited in a coffin in Gethsemane. In this
place the chorus and singing of the angels continued for three whole
days. But {308} after three days, on the angelic music ceasing, since
one of the Apostles had been absent, and came after the third day, and
wished to adore the body which had conceived God, the Apostles, who were
present, opened the coffin; but the body, pure and every way to be
praised, they could not at all find. And when they found only those
things in which it had been laid out and placed there, and were filled
with an ineffable fragrancy proceeding from those things, they shut the
coffin. Being astounded at the miraculous mystery, they could form no
other thought, but that He, who in his own person had vouchsafed to be
clothed with flesh, and to be made man of the most holy Virgin, and to
be born in the flesh, God the Word, and Lord of Glory, and who after
birth had preserved her virginity immaculate, had seen it good after she
had departed from among the living, to honour her uncontaminated and
unpolluted body by a translation before the common and universal
resurrection."

Such is the passage offered to us in its insulated form, as an extract
from Euthymius. To be enabled, however, to estimate its worth, the
inquirer must submit to the labour of considerable research. He will not
have pursued his investigation far, before he will find, that a thick
cloud of uncertainty and doubt hangs over this page of ecclesiastical
history. Not that the evidence alleged in support of the reputed miracle
can leave us in doubt as to the credibility of the tradition; for that
tradition can scarcely be now countenanced by the most zealous and
uncompromising maintainers of the assumption of the Virgin. What I would