God of the philosophers; the idea of pagan polytheism was realised and justified in Christ®! To this Athanasius returns again and again‘(see esp. p. 360); it is the doom of Arianism as a Christian theology.
If Arianism failed to assist the thought of the Church to a solution of the great problem of God, its failure was not less conspicuous with regard to revelation and redemption. The revelation of the Gospel stopped short _ in the person of Christ, did not go back to the Father. God was zo¢ in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, we have access in Christ to a created intelligence, not to the love of God to usward, not to the everlasting Arms, but to a being neither divine nor human. Sinners against heaven and before God, we must accept an assurance of reconciliation from one who does not know Him whom we have offended; the kiss of the Father has never been given to the prodigal. Men have asked how we are justified in ascribing to the infinite God the attributes which we men call good: mercy, justice, love. If Christ is God, the answer lies near; if He is the Christ of Arius, we are left in moral agnosticism. Apart from Christ, the philosophical arguments for a God have their force; they proffer to us an ennobling belief, a grand ‘perhaps’; but the historical inability of Monotheism to retain a last- ing hold among men apart from revelation is an impressive commentary on their compelling power. In Christ alone does God lay hold upon the soul with the assurance of His love (Rom. v. 5—8; Matt. xi.28; John xvii. 3). The God of Arius has held out no hand toward us; he is a far-off abstraction, not a living nor a redeeming God.
The illogicality of Arianism has often been pointed out (Gwatkin, pp. 21 sgg. esp. p. 28); how, starting from the Sonship of Christ, it came round to a denial of His Sonship; how it started with an interest for Monotheism and landed in a vindication of polytheism; how it began from the incomprehensibility of God even to His Son, and ended (in its most pronounced form) with the assertion that the divine Nature is no mystery at all, even to us. It is an insult to the memory of Aristotle to call such shallow hasty syllogising from ill-selected and unsifted first principles by his name. Aristotle himself teaches a higher logic than this. But at this date Aristotelianism proper was extinct. It only survived in the form of ‘ pure’ logic, adopted by the Platonists, but also studied for its own sake in connection with rhetoric arid the art of arguing (cf. Socr. ii. 35). Such an instru- ment might well be a cause of confusion in the hands of men who used it without regard to the conditions of the subject-matter. An illogical compromise between the theology of Paul of Samosata and of Origen, the marvel is that Arianism satisfied any one even in the age of its birth. What has been said above with regard to the conception of God in the early Church may help to explain it; the germ of ethical insight which is latent in adoptionism, and which when neglected by the Church has always made itself felt by reaction, must also receive justice; once again, its inherent intellectualism was in harmony with the dominant theology of the Eastern Church, that is with one side of Origenism. Where analogous conditions have prevailed, as for example in the England of the early eighteenth century, Arianism has tended to reappear with no one of its attendant incongruities missing, But for all that, the doom of Arianism was uttered at Niczea and verified in the six decades which followed. Every possible alternative formula of belief as to the Person of Christ was forced upon the mind of the early Church, was fully tried, and was found wanting. Arianism above all was fully tried and above all found lacking. The Nicene formula alone has been found to render possible the life, to satisfy the instincts of the Church of Christ. The choice lies—nothing is clearer—between that and the doctrine of Paul of Samosata. The latter, it has been said, was misunderstood, was never fairly tried, Asa claimant to represent the true sense of Christianity it was I think once for all rejected when the first Apostles gave the right hand of fellowship to S. Paul (see above, p. xxii.); its future trial must be in the form of yaturalism, as a rival to Christianity, on the basis of a denial of the claim of Christ to be the One Saviour of the World, and of His Gospel to be the Absolute Religion. But Arianism, adding to all the difficulties of a supernatural Christology the spirit of the shallowest rationalism and the fundamental postulate of agnosticism, can surely count for nothing in the Armageddon of the latter days, Spiacente a Dio ed a’ nemici suoi.
The distinction, which in the foregoing discussion we have frequently had under our notice, between the 8 This illustrates the famous paradox of Cardinal Newman (Development, ed. 1878, pp.142-4), that the condemnation of Arian Christology /eft vacant a throne in heaven which the medieval Church legitimately filled with the Blessed Virgin; that the Nicene condemnation of the Arian theology is the vindication of the medieval; that ‘the votaries of Mary do not exceed the true faith, unless the blasphemers of her Son come up to it.’ But the qestion here was one of worship, not of theology. The Arians worshipped Christ, whom they regarded as a created being: therefore, the Nicene fathers urge with one consent, they were idolaters. The idea of a created being capable of being worshipped was an Arian legacy to the Church, no doubt. But this very idea, to Athanasius and Hilary, marked them out as idolaters. It was reserved for later times ‘to find a subject for an Arian predicate’ (Mozley). The argument is an astonishing admission.
t The enormous literature of the subject is partly given by Harnack, ii. p. 182, Schaff, Micene Christ. §§ 119, 120. The student will find great help from Bigg, Bamfz. Lect. pp. 179, note, THE HOMOUSION: ITS MEANING. XXXi r a mes = yvaors of the early Church, the mior.s common to all, and formulated in the /essera or rule of faith, the yvaors the property of apologists and theologians aiming at the expression of faith in terms of the thought of their age, and at times, though for long only slightly, reacting upon the rule of faith itself (Aquileia, Cxesarea Gregory Thaumaturgus), makes itself felt in the account of the Nicene Council. ‘That the legacy of the first world-wide gathering of the Church’s tulers isa Rule of Faith moulded by theological reflexion, one in which the yrdois of Se Church supplements her wiotis, is a momentous fact; a fact for which we have to thank not Athanasius but : rius. The miotis of the Fathers repudiated Arianism as a novelty; but to exclude it from the Church some ee indispensable; and to find a test was the task of theology, of yv@o1s. The Nicene Confession is the Rule of Faith explained as against Arianism. Arianism started with the Christian profession of belief in our Lord’s Sonship. If the result was incompatible with such belief, it was inevitable that an explanation should be given, not indeed of the full meaning of divine Sonship, but of that element in the idea which was ignored or assailed by the misconception of Arius. Such an explanation is attempted in the words é« tis ovolas Tod matpds, bpoovotuy 7@ Marpi, and again in the condemnation of the formula é& érépas Sroardcews 7 ovotas. This explanation was not adopted without hesitation, nor would it have been adopted had any other barrier against the heresy, which all but very few wished to exclude, appeared effective. We now have to examine firstly the grounds of this hesi- tation, secondly the justification of the formula itself, a The objections felt to the word duoovevoy at the council were (1) philosophical, based on the identification of ovata with either eldos (i.e. as implying a “formal essence’ prior to Father and Son alike) or An; (2) dogmatic, based on the identification of ovcia with 7éSe 71, and on the consequent Sabellian sense of the éuoodcioy; (3) Scriptural, based on the non-occurrence of the word in the Bible; (4) Ecclesiastical, based on the condemnation of the word by the Synod which deposed Paul at Antioch in 269.
All these objections were made and felt dona fide, although Arians would of course make the most of them. The subsequent history will shew that their force was outweighed only for the moment with many of the fathers, and that to reconcile the ‘ conservatism’ of the Asiatic bishops to the new formula must be a matter of time. The third or Scriptural objection need not now be discussed at length. Precedent could be pleaded for the introduc- tion into creeds of words not expressly found in Scripture (e.g. the word ‘catholic’ applied to the Church in many ancient creeds, the creed of Gregory Thaumaturgus with tpios reAela, &c. &c.); the only question was, were the non-scriptural words expressive of a Scriptural idea? This was the pith of the question debated between Athanasius and his opponents for a generation after the council; the ‘conservative’ majority eventually came round to the conviction that Athanasius was right. But the question depends upon the meaning of the word itself.
The word means sharing in a joint or common essence, ovata (cf. dudévupos, sharing the same name, &c. &c.). What then is otcfa? The word was introduced into philosophical use, so far as we know, by Plato, and its technical value was fixed for future ages by his pupil Aristotle. Setting aside its use to express ‘existence’ in the abstract, we take the more general use of the word as indicating that which exists in the concrete. In this sense it takes its place at the centre of his system of ‘ categories,’ as the something to which all determinations cf quality, quantity, relation and the rest attach, and which itself attaches to nothing; in Aristotle’s words it alone is self-existent, ywpiordv, whereas all that comes under any of the other categories is &yapioTov, non-existent except as a property of some odaia. But here the difficulty begins. We may look at a concrete term as denoting either this or that individual simply (réde 7), or as expressing its nature, and so as common to more individuals than one. Now properly (xpétws) ovcta is only appropriate to the former purpose. But it may be employed in a secondary sense to designate the latter; in this sense species and genera are dedrepar ovata, the wider class being less truly ovcfo: than the narrower. In fact we here detect the transition of the idea of obaia from the category of ovota proper to that of rody (cf. Athan. p. 478 sg.; he uses ovcla freely in the secondary sense for nontheological purposes in contra Gentes, where it is often best rendered ‘nature ’). Aristotle accordingly uses ovola freely to designate what we call substances, whether simple or compound, such as iron, gold, earth, the heavens, 7d kxlyytov, &c., &c. Corresponding again, to the logical distinction of ‘yévos and éidos is the metaphysical distinction (not exactly of matter and form, but) of matter simply, regarded as rd imoxenwevov, and matter regarded as existing in this or that form, 7d rowdy 7d ev rH odcig, 7d 7/ av eivas, the meeting-point of logic and metaphysics in Aristotle’s system. Agreeably to this distinction, odoia is used sometimes of the latter—the concrete thing regarded in its essential nature, sometimes of the former 4 broxemévn ovata &s An, An being in fact the semmum genus of the material world.
Now the use of the word in Christian theology had exemplified nearly every one of the above senses. In the quasi-material sense éuootovov had been used in the school of Valentinian to express the homogeneity of the two factors in the fundamental dualism of the Universe of intelligent beings. In a somewhat similar sense it is used in the Clementine Homilies xx. 7. The Platonic phrase for the Divine Nature, éewéxewa méons ovaias, adopted by Origen and by Athanasius contra Gentes, appears to retain something of the idea of odoia as implying material existence; and this train of associations had to be expressly disclaimed in defending the Nicene formula. In the sense of homogeneity the word duoovc.or is expressly applied by Origen, as we have seen, to the Father and the Son: onthe other hand, taking oda/a in the ‘primary’ Anistotelian sense, he has repos kar’ ovalay kal bmoKemevor. In the West (see above on Tertullian and Novatian) the Latin substantia (Cicero had in vain attempted to give currency to the less euphonious but more suitable essentia) had taken its place in the phrase wnzus substanti@ ox com- munio substantia, intended to denote not only the homogeneity but the Unity of Father and Son, Accordingly we find Dionysius of Rome pressing the test upon his namesake of Alexandria and the latter not declining it (below, p. 183). But a few years later we find the Origenist bishops, who with the concurrence of Dionysius of Rome deposed Paul of Samosata, expressly repudiating the term. This fact, which is as certain as any fact in Church history (see Routh Re//. iii. 564 &c., Caspari Alte u. Neue. Q., pp. 161 5qJ-), Was a powerful support to the Arians in their subsequent endeavours to unite the conservative East in reaction against the council. Scholars are fairly equally divided as to the explanation of the fact. Some hold, foliowing Athanasius i he. 42, sgg.; Newman’s Arians4, | Shedd i. 362—372 5 and the Introduction to the Tomus and ad ele ee are and eds embodied in this | A/vosin this volume pp. 482, 488. The use of oveia in Aristotle is ities especially that appended to Lpist. Euseb. p. 77; Zabn's tabulated by Bonitz in the fifth volume (index) to the Berlin Marcellus pp. 11 —27 (also p. 87), perhaps the best modern dis- | edition: its use in Plato is less srequent and less technical, but cussion 3 Harnack ii. pp. 228—230, and note 3; Loofs $§ 32—34; | see the brief account in Liddell and Scott.
xxxii PROLEGOMENA, CHAPTER IL, § 3 (2).
in A ee ee a ee and Basil, that Paul imputed the duoodcoy (in a materialising sense) to his opponents, as a consequence of the doctrine they Peace to his own, and that ‘the 80’ in repudiating the word, repudiated the ea es the divine nature could be divided by the emanation of a portion of it in the Logos. Hilary, on the other and, tells us that the word was used by Paul himself (‘male é400dc10v Paulus confessus est, sed numquid melius Arii negaverunt?’) If so, it must have been meant to deny the existence of the Logos as an otcla (i.e. Hypostasis) distinct from the Father. Unfortunately we have not the original documents to refer to. But in either case the word was repudiated at Antioch in one sense, enacted at Niczea in another. The fact however remains that the term does not exclude ambiguity. Athanasius is therefore going beyond strict accuracy when he erie (p. 164) that no one who is not an Arian can fail to be in agreement with the Synod. Marcellus and Photinus alone prove the contrary. But he is right in regarding the word as rigidly excluding the heresy of Arius.. This brings us to the question in what sense odola‘is used in the Nicene definition. We must remember t. strong Western and anti-Origenist influence which prevailed in the council (above, p. xvii.), and the use 0 $réo7acts and ovata as convertible terms in the anathematism (see Excursus A, pp. 77, sgg. below). Now going back for a moment to the correspondence of the two Dionysii, we see that Dionysius of Rome had contended not so much against the sulordination of the Son to the Father as against their undue separation (wemepiomevan Stoordoets). In other words he had pressed the 6uoodcwv upon his namesake in the interest rather of the zzzzty than of the eyuality of the Persons in the Holy Trinity. At Nicwa, the problem was (as shewn above) to explain (at least negatively) how the Church understood the Generation of the Son. Accordingly we find Athanasius in later years explaining that the Council meant to place beyond doubt the Zssential Relation of the Divine Persons to one another (rd Ydiov rs odaias, tabrérys, see de Decr. pp. 161, 163 sg., 165, 168, 319; of course including identity of Nature, pp. 396, 413, 232), and maintaining to the end (where he expresses his own view, P. 490, &c.) the convertibility of ovata and brdoracrs for this purpose. By the word 6 6eds or Oeds he understands ovdev Erepov } thy ovatav rod bvros (de Decr. 22). The conclusion is that in their original sense the definitions of Nica assert not merely the sfecific identity of the Son with the Father (as Peter gva man is of one odofa with Paul, or the Emperor’s statue of one form with the Emperor himself, p. 396), but the full unbroken continuation of the Being of the Father in the Son, the inseparable unity of the Son with the Father in the Oneness of the Godhead. Here the phrase is ‘balanced’ by the é« rs [brocrdoews 4] ovclas rod Marpds, not as though merely one obcia had given existence to another, but in the sense that with such origination the viaia remained the same. This isa ‘first approximation to the mysterious doctrine of the wepsxdépnous,’ coinherence, or ‘ circuminsessio,’ which is necessary to guard the doctrine of the Trinity against tritheism, but which, it must be observed, lifts it out of the reach of the categories of any system of thought in which the workings of human intelligence have ever been able to organise themselves. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity vindicated by the Nicene formula on the one hand remains, after the exclusion of others, as the one direction in which the Christian intellect can travel without frustrating and limiting the movement of faith, without bringing to a halt the instinct of faith in Christ as Saviour, implanted in the Church by the teaching of S. Paul and of S. John, of the Lord Himself: on the other hand it is not a full solution of the intellectual difficulties with which the analysis of that faith and those instincts brings us face to face. That God is One, and that the Son is God, are truths of revelation which the category of ‘ substance’ fails to synthesise. The Nicene Definition furnishes a basis of agreement for the purpose of Christian devotion, worship, and life, but leaves two theologies face to face, with mutual recognition as the condition of the healthy life of either. The theology of Athanasius and of the West is that of the Nicene formula in its original sense. The inseparable Unity of the God of Revelation is its pivot. The conception of Zersonality in the Godhead is its difficulty. The distinctness of the Father, Son, and Spirit is felt (AAos 6 Marhp &AAos 6 vids), but cannot be formulated so as to satisfy our full idea of personality. For this Athanasius had no word; mwpécwroy meant too little (implying as it did no more than an aspect possibly worn but for a special period or purpose), imdéoracis (implying such personality as separates Peter from Paul) too much. But he recognised the admissibility of the sense in which the Nicene formula eventually, in the theology of the Cappadocian fathers, won its way to supremacy in the East. To them trdoracts was an appropriate term to express the distinction of Persons in the God- head, while odefa expressed the divine Mature which they possessed in common (see Excursus A. p. 77 s99.). This sense of otcla approximated to that of species, or eldos (Aristotle’s ‘secondary’ ovcta), while that of bnéorac.s gravitated toward that of personality in the empirical sense. But in neither case did the approximation amount to complete identity. The idea of trine personality was limited by the consideration of the Unity; the mepixdpnois was recognised, although in a somewhat different form, the prominent idea in Athanasius being that of covnherence or immanence, whereas the Cappadocians, while using, of course, the language of John xiv. 11, yet prefer the metaphor of successive dependence bomep e& adrtoews (Bas. Ep. 38, p. 118 D). To Athanasius, the Godhead is complete not in the Father alone, still less in the Three Persons as parts of the one ovcia, but in each Person as much as in a//. The Cappadocian Fathers go back to the Origenist view that the Godhead is complete primarily in the Father alone, but medva¢ely in the Son or Spirit, by virtue of their origination from the Father as myn or airla rhs Oedtntos. To Athanasius the distinct Personality of Son and Spirit was the difficulty; his difference from Origen was wide, from Marcellus subtle. To the Cappadocians the difficulty was the Unity of the Persons; to Marcellus they were ¢oto c@lo opposed, they are the pupils of Origen?. Accordingly when Basil makes a distinction between odofa and ixédorasis in the Nicene anathematism, he is giving not historical exegesis but his own opinion. ai) ee eicane iN in ae eee the Unity of the Godhead in Three Persons, against e Rpt an oe on saat: ather. How then did it escape the danger of lending countenance Re aaa hanasius teels t See without solving it, for the distinction given by him, p. 84, Bere a ss ae hout real meaning (ze say with Tertullian ‘of one substance’). On the eee a ma ie _ at the iE < Son was sufficient to secure the Trinity of Persons. ‘By the name council in its revision netic Ge oe d shift eee Snort (P-434 Cra et) wenn ist ie oe etl Peer eet eesarean creed shifted vids to the principal position where it took the place of Adyos. y eed imposed no additional test in that direction (the é« ts ovolas is important but not 2 Gregory Thaumaturgus was the great Origenist influence 9, edited by Draseke in Z¢schr. fier K.G. viii. 85sgg.- Apollinarius in northern Asia Minor: the Cappadocian fathers wer r Minc appac 2 ere also | was of S iani igen: influenced in the direction of the 6foov¥cvoy by Apollinarius: see | also p. Fist: SE ee a ene eee ee the correspondence between Basil and the latter, Bas. EAA. 8 » THE HOMOUSION: ITS JUSTIFICATION. XXxili decisive in this respect). This was felt as an objection to the Creed, and the objection was pointed by the influence of Marcellus at the council. The historical position of Marcellus is in fact, as we shall see, the principal key to the ‘conservative’ reaction which followed. The insertion into the conservative creeds of a clause asserting the endlessness of Christ’s Kingdom, which eventually received ecumenical authority, was an expression of this feeling. But a final explanation between the Nicene doctrine and Monarchianism could not come about until the idea of Personality had been tested in the light of the appearance of the Son in the Flesh. The solution, or rather definition, of the problem is to be sought in the history of the Christological questions which began with Apollinarius of Laodicea, The above account of the anti-Arian test formulated at Niczea will suffice to explain the motives for its adoption, the difficulties which made that adoption reluctant, and the fact of the reaction which followed. One thing is clear, namely that given the actual conditions, nothing short of the test adopted would have availed to exclude the Arian doctrine. It is also I think clear, that not only was the current theology of the Eastern Church unable to cope with Arianism, but that it was itself a danger to the Church and in need of the corrective check of the Nicene definition. Hellenic as was the system of Origen, it was in its spirit Christian, and saturated with the influence of Scripture. It could never have taken its place as the expression of the whole mind of the Church; but it remains as the noblest monument of a Christian intellect resolutely in love with truth for its own sake, and bent upon claiming for Christ the whole range of the legitimate activity of the human spirit. But the age had inherited only the wreck of Origenism, and its partial victory in the Church had brought confusion in its train, the leaders of the Church were characterised by secular knowledge rather than grasp of first principles, by dogmatic intellectualism rather than central apprehension of God in Christ. Eusebius of Czsarea is their typical repre- sentative. The Nicene definition and the work of Athanasius which followed were a summons back to the simple first principles of the Gospel and the Rule of Faith. What then is their value to ourselves? Above all, this, that they have preserved to us what Arianism would have destroyed, that assurance of Knowledge of, and Reconciliation to, God in Christ of which the divinity of the Saviour is the indispensable condition; if we are now Christians in the scnse of S. Paul we owe it under God to the work of the great synod. Not that the synod explained all; or did more than effectually ‘block off false forms of thought or avenues of unbalanced inference’ which ‘chal- lenged the acceptance of Christian people.’ The decisions of councils are ‘primarily not the Church saying ““yes”’ to fresh truths or developments or forms of consciousness; but rather saying ‘“‘no” to untrue and misleading modes of shaping and stating her truth,’ (Lax Mundi, ed.i. p. 240, cf. p. 334). It is objected that the Nicene Formula, especially as understood by Athanasius, is itself a ‘false form of thought,’ a flat contradiction in terms. That the latter is true we do not dispute (see Newman’s notes infra, p. 336, note 1, &c.). But before pro- nouncing the form of thought for that reason a false one, we must consider what the ‘terms’ are, and to what they are applied. To myself it appears that a religion which brought the divine existence into the compass of the categories of any philosophy would by that very fact forfeit its claim to the character of revelation. The categories of human thought are the outcome of organised experience of a sensible world, and beyond the limits of that world they fail us. This is true quite apart from revelation. The ideas of essence and substance, personality and will, separateness and continuity, cause and effect, unity and plurality, are all in different degrees helps which the mind uses in order to arrange its knowledge, and valid within the range of experience, but which become a danger when invested with absolute validity as things in themselves. Even the mathematician reaches real results by operating with terms which contain a perfect contradiction (e.g. /—1, and to some extent the ‘calculus of operations’). The idea of Will in man, of Personality in God, present difficulties which reason cannot reconcile.
The revelation of Christ is addressed primarily to the will not to the intellect, its appeal is to Faith not to Theology. Theology is the endeavour of the Christian intellect to frame for itself conceptions of matters belonging to the immediate consequences of our faith, matters about which we must believe something, but as to which the Lord and His Apostles have delivered nothing formally explicit. Theology has no doubt its certainties beyond the express teaching of our Lord and the New Testament writers; but its work is subject to more than the usual limitations of human thought: we deal with things outside the range of experience, with celestial things; but ‘we have no celestial Janguage.’ To abandon all theology would be to acquiesce in a dumb faith: we are to teach, to explain, to defend; the Adyos coglas and Adyos yyécews have from the first been gifts of the Spirit for the building up of the Body. But we know in part and prophesy in part, and our terms begin to fail us just in the region where the problem of guarding the faith of the simple ends and the inevitable metaphysic, into which all pure reflexion merges, begins. Eire obv pidocopytéov elite ui piAocopntéoy, pirocopntéov, ‘man is metaphysical nolens volens y only let us recollect that when we find ourselves in the region of antinomies we are crossing the frontier line between revelation and speculation, between the domain of theology and that of ontology. That this line is approached in the definition of the great council no one will deny. But it was reached by the council and by the subsequent consent of tne Church reluctantly and under compulsion. The bold assumption that we can argue from the revelation of God in Christ to mysteries beyond our experience was made by the Gnostics, by Arius: the Church met them by a denial of what struck at the root of her belief, not by the claim to erect formulze applied merely for the lack of better into a revealed ontology. In the terms Person, Hypostasis, Will, Essence, Nature, Generation, Procession, we have the embodiment of ideas extracted from experience, and, as applied to God, representing merely the best attempt we can make to explain what we mean when we speak of God as Father and of Christ as His Son. Even these last sacred names convey their full meaning to us only in view of the historical person of Christ and of our relation to God through Him. That this meaning is based upon an absolute relation of Christ to the Father is the rock of our faith, That relation is mirrored in the name Son of God: but what it is in itself, when the empirical connotations of Sonship are stripped away, we cannot possibly know. ‘Opootiotos Te Tarpt, 2 zfs ovcias tod Marpdés* these words assert at once our faith that such relation exists and our ignorance of its nature. To the simplicity of faith it is enough to know (and this knowledge is what our formula secures) that in Christ we have not only the perfect Example of Human Love to God, but the direct expression and assurance of the Father’s Love to us. (c) Materials for Reaction. ‘The victory of Niczea was rather a surprise than a solid conquest. As it was not the VOL, IV. ¢ XXXiV PROLEGOMENA, CHAPTER IL, § 3 (2).
spontaneous and deliberate purpose of the bishops present, but a revolution which a minority had forced through by sheer strength of clearer Christian thought, a reaction was inevitable as soon as the half-convinced conservatives returned home’ (Gwatkin). The reaction, however, was not for a long time overtly doctrinal. The defeat, the moral humiliation of Arianism at the council was too signal, the prestige of the council itself too overpowering, the Emperor too resolute in supporting its definition, to permit of this. Not till after the death of Constantine in 337 does the policy become manifest of raising alternative symbols to a coordinate rank with that of Niczea; not till six years after the establishment of Constantius as sole Emperor,—1.e. not till 357,—did Arianism once again set its mouth to the trumpet. | During the reign of Constantine the reaction, though doctrinal in its motive, was personal in its ostensible grounds. The leaders of the victorious minority at Nicaea are one by one attacked on this or that pretence and removed from their Sees, till at the time of Constantine’s death the East is in the hands of their opponents. What were the forces at work which made this possible?