true bearing of its more characteristic elements. He could lay stress on what distinguished the Son, as he conceived him, from the generality of creatures: could proclaim him morally immutable; could even give him the title of "full God," in the sense, of course, of a titular divinity. And this modification, or "embellishment," as it has been called, of the original Arian "impiety," was carried yet farther by Arius's powerful supporter, Eusebius of Nicomedia, and others like him, than by Arius himself, who, to do him justice, reaffirmed, in his letter to his own bishop, his belief that the Son was a creature. The Eusebians, not liking openly to attack the Nicene doctrine, adopted an evasive line of speaking on the person and being of the Son: they addressed themselves to the work of undermining the Homoousian faith by suggesting formulas which ignored the Homoousion, but which seemed to recognise the Son's divine dignity, hailed Him, in the words of the "Lucianic" or proper Antiochene creed, as "the Father's adequate image," and at the same time satisfied the numerous minds that suspected Sabellianism in Homoousian language, and feared that to represent the Son as within the incommunicable essence was, in effect, to deny His true personality.

Such was the earlier kind of Semi-Arianism, represented in part by the creeds of Antioch, the creed presented to Constans, and afterwards adopted at Philippopolis, not to say by the "long exposition" or "Macrostich" of 344. But out of this theology, so to call it, of expedients, grew up, by degrees, a bonâ fide belief in the theological position thus provided. The facts bear out Newman's view, that many pious and learned divines, such as Basil of Ancyra, were really anxious to go all lengths in extolling the Son of God, short of the Homoousion, and only shrank from that because they fancied that it savoured of Sabellianism, or of materialistic conceptions of Godhead; as to which Hilary observes that these false senses of the term would be excluded if care were but taken to affirm the Divine Sonship, and St. Basil urges that it was even anti-Sabellian, "for nothing is 'homoousion' with itself." But the elder Basil and his friends were really anxious to think and speak reverentially of their Saviour. They would not admit that He was a creature, as the old Arians had said; they owned the Filiation to be "apart from time," and to have a relation to the Father's "essence: so that they got near to the recognition of the Son as co-eternal and co-essential, but did not come up to

it. They were, so to say, befogged by the subtlety of their own distinctions, and did not see that they ought to have either affirmed more or denied more. It appears that their formula, "Homoiousion," -He is not one in essence with the Father, but He is "like in essence" to the Father,-was suggested, in the first instance, by what passed at Alexandria when the first Arians were condemned. Those men had denied, among other things, that the Son was "like in essence" to the Father. The men of the later school of whom we are now thinking had not, according to Socrates, employed as their own this formula rejected by the original Arians until the year 360, when Macedonius, who had been Semi-Arian bishop of Constantinople, suggested it as a convenient party watchword. Yet even if we could accept this statement, their minds were "Homoiousian" before they promulgated the phrase. Of that phrase three things may be said: first, that it was its authors who exhibited that readiness to "divide the world upon an iota" which has often been imputed to the Catholics, whose phrase was in the field before theirs attempted to dislodge it; secondly, that, as Gibbon candidly remarks, a close approximation in terms may cover a wide opposition of ideas; and thirdly, that it showed the inconsecutiveness of their thought, for how could one who was not fully God be "like to the essence which is unique because supreme? The Semi-Arians sometimes took advantage of the phrase, "In all points like to the Father; a phrase which Cyril of Jerusalem, who was long ranked among them, employed in his "Catechetical lectures," and which Basil, in May, 359, expanded, so to say, into "Like in hypostasis, and being, and existence." But, in truth, Socrates's statement (ignored by Sozomen) places the adoption of the Homoiousion, as a substitute for the Homoousion, at least three years too late-for it was evidently current, as we shall see, before the middle of 357. And it was asserted by them with a genuine desire to bar out the grosser and more offensive forms of Arianism, and with a religious earnestness which, as Newman expresses it, makes "the men better than their creed," and goes far to explain the tenderness and considerateness with which two such haters of Arianism as Athanasius and Hilary speak of them as virtually differing rather in terms than in real belief from the upholders of Nicene orthodoxy. The respect thus paid to the best representatives of this kind of SemiArianism may be most conveniently represented in the title of "Saint" allowed to Cyril, who was, at any rate for a considerable

time, “afraid of the Homoousion," yet in teaching allowed all that it meant, a veritable, personal, and eternal Divine Sonship. The hope entertained by Catholics as to the Semi-Arians as a body was that, by finding their position to be unreal, they might come to unlearn their prejudices against the Homoousion; a hope in some instances verified at a later time, in others doomed to disappointment.

But there was another development of the Eusebian or older Semi-Arian school which tended in the opposite direction, towards an Arianism more thorough-going and intense. This was its chief representative, the "Homœan" theory, called "Acacian" from Acacius, bishop of Cæsarea. But its basis was of older suggestion. Early in the controversy, at the Nicene Council itself, it appears that a jealousy was expressed as to the use on the Catholic side of any terms "not found in Scripture." The Nicene fathers endeavoured to meet this feeling by adopting Scriptural phrases, but found that every one of them was quibbled away on the Eusebian side, and that it was necessary, in the interests of Scriptural truth itself, to employ such terms as "essence" and "co-essential." After the Council, Eusebius of Cæsarea, in his letter to his flock, implied some sympathy on his part with this dislike of "non-Scriptural" language; at least, one reason which he there gave for having been ready to reject some Arian phrases was that they were "not in Scripture." And this point, "The Homoousion is not a Scriptural term," was urged by Constantia's Arian chaplain on Constantius, and no doubt many times in other cases. "Why," it might be asked, "should not all Christians be content to express their belief in the words sanctioned by the Holy Spirit? Have we not seen trouble enough arise from technicalities of man's framing? Is not the safe, the charitable, the truth-seeking course simply this, to call the Son 'like to the Father according to the Scriptures,' and if you will, 'in all points like,' without employing such words as Ousia or Homoousion"? There was a manifest plausibility in this suggestion: it appealed to some minds that were weary of debate, to others that suspected some mischief in the Homoousion, or in any other form of a philosophic term that had been taken in different senses; to others, again, who had a real honest reverence for Scripture, and might be apt to forget that a dispute as to the true meaning of Scripture words could only be met by a "non-Scriptural" expression of that meaning, and that no question was ever solved, but could

only be shelved, by "colourless indefiniteness." And it was the learned and ready-witted successor of Eusebius of Cæsarea, a man very capable of shifting his ground, but whose real affinities were with true Arians, that gave prominence to the thought, and emphasis to the watchword-about 350, as Newman considers, when he had become involved in his quarrel with the "SemiArian" Cyril. Thus the symbol of the "Homoion" gradually came forward into view: it was intended by its authors to resist those Semi-Arian tendencies which seemed favourable, in the long run, to the Catholic dogma; and, as we shall find, its result was a stimulus and effective support given to the most pronounced form of Arianism; for although the formula of which we must now say something, and which appears as the Ultra-Arian watchword, was verbally in direct contradiction to the confession of "likeness," its maintainers could admit a "likeness" which was only moral, and therefore predicable of any created being whose will was at one with the will of God.

Ultra-Arianism, in fact, was a revival, without disguise, of the old Arianism that shrank not from calling the Son of God" a creature and a handywork." Its formula was, "The Son is unlike the Father: " it called Him " Anomoion," and hence its maintainers were known as Anomoans. Their leader was Aetius, a man whose earlier life was a series of strange adventures, in which he displayed a versatility and ingenuity that might forecast his subsequent ascendency over many minds less energetic and selfreliant. He might have been surnamed "the Irrepressible." A friendless orphan lad at Antioch, he began life in the employment of a vinedresser, and had then gone into the trade of a goldsmith, or, as the Catholics chose to say, of a blacksmith or tinker: he next appeared as a physician's assistant; and in the medical society of Antioch his natural aptitude for disputation became sharpened and intensified, until he found his way into employment as a "sophist' or professional arguer; and this, with the bias towards Arianism which an Arianized medical school had communicated, is said to have recommended him to Paulinus, the Arianizing bishop of Antioch. Then it was, according to Philostorgius, his admiring historian, that he made good his position as irresistible in logical fence, or what was then called "eristic," and vented such strong Arianism that Eulalius, the next bishop, obliged him to leave the city. He retired to Anazarbus in Cilicia, where, after he had for a time been servant and pupil to a "grammarian," or

lecturer upon ancient standard texts, Athanasius the bishop, who had, as his great namesake informs us, spoken of our Lord as "one of the hundred sheep," gave him some countenance, and some instruction in the Gospels. From Anazarbus he passed on to Tarsus, and read the Epistles with a friend named Antony; then, venturing to revisit Antioch, was welcomed by Leontius, at that time a presbyter, who introduced him to the study of the Prophets. He again returned to Cilicia, and there was sorely vexed by being beaten in an argument with one of the Borborians, an infamous Gnostic sect; but he found a salve for this mortification at Alexandria, where he utterly confounded a leading Manichean. He then resumed his old medical studies, combining them with further pursuit of Aristotelian logic; and, "thus accomplished," he once more returned home, where Leontius, now bishop of Antioch, ordained him deacon-Hefele says, about 350. As his opinions must have been well known, at least in their main features, this was one of the boldest steps on which that cautious prelate ever ventured; and Flavian and Diodore remonstrated so indignantly, that he was obliged to forbid Aetius to officiate. These remonstrances were probably grounded on his offensive rationalism-on what Theodoret calls his alteration of theology into "technology," or his sophistical use of ambiguities connected with such a term as Ingenerate," or his insistence on the mutual exclusiveness of the phrases "from whom" and "through whom," which Basil mentions in his work "On the Holy Spirit." In any case, Aetius was requested by his friends to revisit Alexandria, and oppose Athanasius on his own ground; and he kept no terms with the more moderate Arians, but insisted on the non-eternity and createdness of the Son as involving a difference from the Father in essence, which could be summarised in the word "Anomoion"-understood, of course, in regard to nature, not to will. He gained a powerful assistant in Eunomius, a Cappadocian who was recommended to him as a secretary, who was destined to succeed and surpass him in the theoretical formulation of UltraArianism, and who also resembled him in the early struggles by which he rose from the condition of a labourer's son to that of a "pædagogus" (a servant whose duty was to conduct a boy to and from school), and, on being dismissed by his employer, took to tailoring until he became acquainted with Aetius. Such, at least, is the account given by Gregory of Nyssa, who also accuses him of laxity in moral teaching; but this is probably due to hostile