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clude with the Benedictines that S. Athanasius was not at Rome when the Eusebians sent their legates thither, A.D. 339, nor when the Council was held at Alexandria, and legates were despatched from it to Rome in 340, nor in the Lent of 341, -when Gregory invaded Alexandria;-but that he arrived there in May 341, and in November of 342 Julius wrote to the Eusebians that he had been there eighteen months.' For the rest of the history we refer our readers to Bishop Kaye.

The death of Constantine introduces us to a different scene. Hitherto the efforts of the Arians had been directed against the Catholic bishops alone. Knowing the real mind of Constantine on the Council of Nicæa, they had not ventured formally to set up any other Creed than the one then published; but from the accession to the death of Constantius, scarcely a year passed in which some division of the Arians, now through court influence become the dominant party, did not meet to produce a fresh Creed. Bishop Kaye has given a partial enumeration of those which are yet extant; and as they form one of the most prominent features of the heresy, and as a comparison of them is of much use in its elucidation, we will complete his list, and lay before our readers such portions of each as bear reference to the doctrines of Arianism; omitting those which are not immediately to the point, or which treat of questions that were uncontroverted. They show, unanswerably, and out of the mouths of their own framers and upholders, that it is impossible to conceive any idea of a Redeemer between that of the true Nicene doctrine and of a mere Humanitarianism, to which latter idea all these documents of whatever class, carefully as they may strive to disguise or escape the fact, do most assuredly tend.

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1. The first doctrinal statement of the party, though not formally a creed, is that contained in a letter written by Arius to Alexander, and contained in the Encyclical Epistle of that bishop, portions of which are as follows: Christ was not 'always the Word of God, but was made from nothing; He is a creature and a work; He does not resemble the Father in essence, nor is He His true and natural Word or Wisdom, but, being one of His works and creatures, is called so impro'perly; He is foreign to, and diverse from the Essence of God, and He does not perfectly and accurately know the Father, ' nor is He able truly to see Him. He was created for our 'sakes, and would not have existed had not God pleased to 'create us.'?

2. The Creed that Arius with Euzoïus gave to Constantine

1 §§ 8. 11. Vita S. Athanasii, p. xlii.

2 Soc. i. 6.

in the year 331 ran as follows:-"We believe in ... Jesus Christ the Son of God, who was created before all ages, God the Word, by whom all things were made in heaven and earth,' &c. Rufinus describes this Creed as Symbolum sensu quidem alienum a Nicæna fide, verbis tamen haudquaquam 'dissentientem.' The one which he concealed in his sleeve, if, as Valesius thinks, it were different to this, has perished.

3. At the Council of Antioch, in 341, the party published four creeds, which are the first types of those Semi-Arian formulæ which were afterwards so rife. In the first, after disclaiming Arius as their master, they say merely: 'We believe in one Only-begotten Son of God, Who was before all ages, and was with the Father Who begot Him,' &c.

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4. The second, which, according to Sozomen, the Arians professed to have found in the handwriting of Lucian, is of a higher cast of doctrine. It says, as S. Athanasius has given it, We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ the Son, the only-begotten "God, by Whom were all things, Who was begotten before all ages of the Father, God of God, Whole of Whole, Only of Only, Perfect of Perfect, King of King, Lord of Lord, Living 'Word, Living Wisdom, True Light, Way, Truth, Resurrection, Shepherd, Door, Unchangeable and Immutable, the unal'tered Image of the Father, the First-born of every creature, Who was in the beginning with God, God the Word, as it is 'written in the Gospel, "And the Word was God."... He 'was the Mediator between God and man.' In the conclusion it anathematizes those who say, 'that time or season or age ' either is or has been before the generation of the Son, or that 'the Son is a creature (тíopa) as one of the creatures, or an offspring as one of the offsprings, or a work (Toinμa) as one ' of the works.'

Whether this creed were really Lucian's, or not, of course we cannot say; but if it were, his followers kept on the whole to their master's doctrine, for however their expressions may vary, this may be taken as a fair sample of true Semi-Arian belief, which acknowledged, with the former part of the above creed, a Godhead of Christ, though one inferior to that of the Father; but held at the same time with the latter part, that He was in fact a creature; by which contradiction they must, if pressed, have either fallen into Arianism on the one hand, or into a Ditheistic creed on the other.

With this dilemma, S. Athanasius does not fail to press them: I. he says, to call Christ a creature, though with the qualification, not as one of the creatures,' is still to make Him essentially a creature; as to term Him an offspring, but not as

1 Valesius' Annotations on Sozomen, ii. 30.

one of the offsprings,' is to deny that He is the only-begotten. 'One creature,' he argues, differs from another, light from light, sun from moon, angels from thrones; yet they are all creatures, and all remain in their own essence as they were made.'

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II. To adopt Bishop Kaye's condensed account of S. Athanasius's words,

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'The Arians are justly open to the charge of Polytheism or Atheism, because they speak of the Son as a creature external to the Father, and say that the Spirit is from that which was not. Either they say that the Word is not God, or, being compelled by the letter of Scripture to admit that He is God, yet, by asserting that He is not proper to the essence of the Father, they give opportunity for the introduction of many Gods, because of their difference in kind. Athanasius enlarges upon the absurdities which flow from the Arian doctrine. By making the Son a creature, and yet acknowledging Him to be God, they introduce two Gods, one the Creator, the other a creature; one increate, the other created; and they have a twofold faith, one in the true God, the other in Him whom they have made and framed, and called God. . . They charge the Catholics with saying that there are two increate; but while they deny that there are two increate, they introduce two Gods, and these having different natures, one created, the other increate.' 2

The Oxford annotator thinks the word Mediator' the most catholic of this creed; but it must have escaped him that Eusebius of Cæsarea employs the same expression to avoid the confession both of the true Godhead and Manhood: ""A • Mediator is not of one, for He has not His essence to be ' defined a Mediator in the case of one; wherefore He is not a ' mean of one, but necessarily a mean of two, being neither of 'those between whom He is.... when He is Mediator between 'God and man, being between each class He is neither because 'He is a Mediator, being neither He Who is the One and only 'God, nor a man like other men.'

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5. The creed of Lucian not satisfying the Arians, they at the same Council adopted another, framed by Theophronius, Bishop of Tyana, a city afterwards the scene of a Catholic Council. This creed teaches that Christ is the Only-begotten Son, God, Word, Power, and Wisdom, begotten of the Father 'before the ages, perfect God of perfect God, with God in 'hypostasis.'

6. They drew up, lastly, a fourth formula a few months later, which they sent to Constans in France. It terms Christ the 'Only-begotten Son our Lord... before all ages begotten from the Father, God of God, Light of light, by Whom all things were made... Word, Wisdom, Power, Life, true Light.' At the

Oration ii. § 19. Kaye, p. 191.

2 S. Athanasius, Oration iii. § 16. Bp. Kaye, pp. 231, 232.
3 Contra Marcellum, lib. i. chap. 1.

conclusion it anathematizes those who say that the Son is from nothing, or is of another Substance, è§ érépas vπOσTAσÉWS, and not from God, or that there was a time when He was not.' Taking hypostasis, with the Benedictines and Bishop Kaye, to be synonymous with ovoía, in which sense alone it would have been used by the Arians, as the chief opponents of Sabellianism, it is difficult to see how the second of these anathemas, if stated positively, can, in itself, be taken to express any but the Nicene doctrine.

We will here pause to correct a singular mistake of Baronius': Julius, in his letter to the Easterns, objected against the bishops of the Council of Antioch, who sent Gregory to usurp the see of S. Athanasius, as being incapable of ordaining a Bishop to Alexandria, because they were distant from that city thirty-six stages—ἐκ τριάκοντα καὶ ἑξ μονῶν—when the canon law required that every bishop should be ordained by the bishops of his own province. Baronius takes these words to refer to the Arians who were present at the Council, and he accordingly says, on their authority, that from so great a number of bishops as were there,' (ninety as S. Athanasius says, ninety-seven according to S. Hilary, ninety-nine as we read in Sozomen,) there were only thirty-six Arians who agreed to the decrees of the Council, which they carried their own way, either by clandestine means, or through the support of the emperor !"

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7. Three years after this Council they met again, and produced the Creed which is called from its length the Macrostich; in which they speak of Christ in the same language as that of the fourth Antiochene. They also published, with others, the same anathemas, adding however a partial belief of the doctrine of the Circumincessio, or Tepixwpnois, all the Father em'bosoming the Son, and all the Son hanging and adhering to 'the Father, and resting in His bosom continually'-and in an 'all-perfect Trinity, that is, the Father and the Son and the 'Holy Ghost-and we call,' they say, 'the Father God and 'the Son God; but they are not two Gods, for we confess one 'dignity of the Godhead, and one exact harmony of the kingdom. 6 For thus have the Divine words handed down to us the 'account that the Divine Monarchy exists in Christ.' At the same time that they speak in this catholic manner, on the one hand, they also, on the other, on the strength of Proverbs viii. 22, and in terms closely resembling those of the Creed of Lucian, make Him a creature. This Creed they sent into Italy.

1 A.D. 341. §§ 4, 5.

8. The Council of Sardica, A.D. 347,' being composed of Catholic Bishops, admitted no new Creed; but the Arian Council of Philippopolis, held in opposition to it, repeated the fourth Creed of Antioch. In its anathema, however, the word 'substantia' is used for the hypostasis' of that Council. Their anathemas are mostly composed of those of the fourth Antiochene and Macrostich. According to Socrates and Sozomen, there now first fell on the Church the shadow of an event which was to come long afterwards; the separation of East and West: each, after this Council, following the division of the empire, and keeping to its own side of the range of Mounts Hamus and Rhodope, which formed the boundary of Thrace and Illyricum.2

9. The first Sirmian, A.D. 351, was their next Creed. It is, as far as our subject is concerned, a repetition of the fourth Antiochene.

10. Sulpicius Severus makes mention of an epistle published by the Arians, in the name of Constantius, at the Council of Milan, A.D. 355, which is not extant. It would appear to have been of a more decidedly Arian cast than any of the preceding, for that historian describes it as 'omni pravitate refertam,' and the people refused to receive it.3

11. The second Sirmian, A.D. 357, shows a considerable decline in doctrine, forbidding all use of the words oμoovotos or ópotovσios, as perplexing people's minds, and not being found in Scripture. It applies John xx. 17, and x. 29, to establish the Semi-Arian doctrine of an inequality in the Godhead of the Father and Son, but allows (against Anomaanism) that the Son only, with the Father, knows the manner of His own Generation. It was this Creed which the aged Hosius was persecuted into signing.

12. In the following year the Semi-Arians held a Council at Ancyra, under Basil the Bishop-the leader of the Semi-Arians-in protest against the last, as Dr. Newman thinks. To its creed were attached eighteen anathemas, twelve of which are preserved by S. Hilary; the eighteenth seems to have repeated the opposition of the Council last-mentioned to the term of One Substance; but it appears to have been soon suppressed.*

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13. In the same year the same party published another Creed, composed of the so-called Creed of the Council of

1 We have given the usual date of this Council, but it is a question of some uncertainty. Our limits do not alow us to discuss it; but those who wish to examine the question at length will and a full dissertation on it in the preface, of the Historical Tracts of S. Athanasius, Lib. Fathers, vol. xiii.

2 Soc. ii. 22. Soz. iii. 13. Socrates terms this range Tiσoukis. See Valesius in loc. 3 History, book ii. chap. 55. Tillemont, Hist. Arians, § 73.

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