"1

or two of characteristic caveat about the "taint of fanaticism" in the mind of "the primate of Egypt," does justice to his position as high among the great men of history; describes him as "patient of labour, jealous of fame"-that is, of his fair fame,and "careless of safety;" and pronounces that "his superiority of character and abilities would have qualified him, far better than the degenerate sons of Constantine, for the government of a great monarchy:' as if there were a certain irony in the fate which placed the liberty and security of an Athanasius at the disposal of a Constantius II. And so, in the perfect language of Dean Church, "Greeks saw their own nature and their own gifts elevated, corrected, transformed, glorified, in the heroic devotion of Athanasius, who, to all their familiar qualities of mind, brought a tenacity, a 1 Gibbon, iii. 70.

soberness, a height and vastness of aim, an inflexibility of purpose, which they admired the more because they were just the powers in which the race failed." 1

And yet, however much we may be fascinated by the brilliant or stormy pictures which succeed each other in this extraordinary career, however strongly it may appeal to our capacity of appreciating abilities so varied and a personality so majestic, we shall not really understand Athanasius unless we take full and serious account of the motive power of his activities and endurances, nor, one may add, unless the sympathy of a common belief can make us feel that it was well worth while for him so to do and so to suffer. What, then, was the enemy against which he waged a lifelong warfare?

Of Arianism a great authority has said that "never was a heresy stronger, more ver

1 Gifts of Civilisation, etc., p. 249.

It

satile, more endowed with all the apparatus of controversy, more sure, as it might have seemed, of the future of the world." It " "was a political force," and "a philosophical disputant." If it had affinities to that Antiochene school which retained some impressions from "Samosatene" misbelief, it could also quote language in which Alexandrian divines had overstated the "Filial Subordination."2 appealed to those who were sensitively and actively watchful against a Sabellian confusion between the Son and the Father; it could even recommend itself to recent converts, who brought into the Christian area some notions derived from their abandoned polytheism; and its singular aptitude for utilising secular agencies and adopting irreligious methods is a fact not to be ignored in

'Liddon, Bamp. Lect. p. 446.

2 Properly, Subordinatio-the position of the Son, as eternally derived from the Father, who is "of none:" Athanasius, holding this, held also the Filial co-equality.

any estimate of its character.

And what was

its essential dogma? That the Son of God was not eternal, and not uncreated, but only the first of all the beings that had come into existence at the fiat of the One Most High;1 the eldest of all, the most exalted of all, the instrument by which the others were created, but still, in the last analysis, one of them, "a thing made," " a work." Against this theory the Nicene Council, in its Creed as originally worded, had professed belief in "One Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten of the Father (as) only begotten, that is, from the essence of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, very God from very God, begotten, not made, of one essence with the Father ;— Through whom all things, both things in heaven and things on earth, came into being; Who for us men, and for our salvation, came

1 Athanasius sets forth the Arian propositions in Orat. i. 5, ad Ep. Æg. 12, etc.

down and was incarnate, became man, suffered, and rose again the third day; ascended into the heavens, will come to judge the quick and dead."

As every one knows, the specially characteristic term in this formulary was "Homoousion," Co-essential, less correctly rendered Consubstantial, or, as we say, "of one substance." It was open to various objections, arising out of notions which had been attached to the Greek word "ousia."4 But Athanasius long afterwards took pains to explain that

As ovoía had been also used both for an individual and a species, and by Stoics for matter, some confusion was inevitable. Paul of Samosata had damaged the term "Homoousion" by pretending that it implied a pre-existent essence, divided between the Father and the Son; and long after the Nicene Council it was associated in many minds either with the notion of a quasi-materialistic partition of the Divine Being, or of a Sabellian denial of the Son's distinct personality (see Hilary, de Synod. 68, 84, Fragm. ii. 2; Sozomen, ii. 18, iii. 18, vi. 7). Yet the great Alexandrians, who, before the Nicene Council, had withstood Sabellianism, whose language had given some occasion to Arianism, and to whom unspiritual conceptions of God were abhorrent, had adhered to the term: Newman, Arians, p. 198.