precision of statement. It was necessary to do this, if error was to be excluded; but there was nothing new in the faith as thus stated, except its terminology. That may have been new-though it was not altogether such a novelty as was alleged-but the new terms borrowed from Greek dialectics were only adopted in order to protect the old faith. Whatever development there was, was development by way of explanation, not development by way of addition. It was saying a thing in a new way, not saying a new thing. The belief of the Church was really the same before and after Nicæa, only after Nicea it was held with a deeper insight into its full bearings, and a clearer perception of the relation of its different parts to one another. What actually happened at Nicæa has never been better expressed than by Dr. Liddon in a famous passage of his Bampton Lectures, with the citation of which this section may be appropriately closed

:

66

"When the question was raised whether Jesus Christ was or was not " of one substance with " the Father, it became clear that of two courses one must be adopted. Either an affirmative answer must be given, or the teaching of the Apostles themselves must be explained away. As a matter of fact, the Nicene fathers only affirmed, in the philosophical language of the fourth century, what our Lord and the Apostles had taught in the popular dialects of the first. If, then, the Nicene Council developed, it was a development by explanation. It was a development which placed the intrinsi

cally unchangeable dogma, committed to the guardianship of the Church, in its true relation to the new intellectual world that had grown up around Christians in the fourth century. Whatever vacillations of thought might have been experienced here or there, whatever doubtful expressions might have escaped from theologians of the intervening period, no real doubt could be raised as to the meaning of the original teachers of Christianity, or as to the true drift and main current of the continuous traditional belief of the Church. The Nicene divines interpreted in a new language the belief of their first fathers in the faith. They did not enlarge it; they vehemently protested that they were simply preserving and handing on what they had received. The very pith of their objection to Arianism was its novelty: it was false because it was of recent origin. They themselves were forced to say what they meant by their Creed, and they said it. Their explanation added to the sum of authoritative ecclesiastical language, but it did not add to the number of articles in the Christian faith: the area of the Creed was not enlarged. The Nicene Council did not vote a new honour to Jesus Christ which He had not before possessed: it defined more clearly the original and unalterable bases of that supreme place which from the days of the Apostles He had held in the thought and heart, in the speculative and active life, of Christendom.'1

1 Bampton Lectures, p. 429.

The Nicene Creed from Nicea to Chalcedon THE Creed of Nicæa was ultimately accepted by all the bishops present at the Council except two, but there were several who only signed under pressure, and with mental reservations; and the bishops had scarcely separated before a determined effort was made to undo the work of the Council. It was soon manifest that the battle was not yet won, and long, weary years of struggle and controversy were to elapse before the faith as proclaimed in the Creed was firmly established as the faith of Christendom. Into the general history of the controversy there is no need to enter here, for in spite of all efforts to dislodge the term 'Homoousios' (being of one substance) from its place in the Creed, the defenders of it, and notably Athanasius, clung firmly to it as absolutely necessary to guard the true faith, and as being the one term which the Arians could not explain away. By the different parties into which the Arians were split up in the years that followed the Council various substitutes were proposed, ranging from the bald expression unlike,' through the vague "like,' up to 'Homoiousios' or 'of like substance,' the

6

term which came nearer than any other to 'Homoousios,' the word chosen to safeguard the true faithindeed so close did it come as to give rise to Gibbon's famous sneer against the furious contests which the difference of a single diphthong excited between the Homoousians and the Homoiousians '1. a sneer which may be fairly met by pointing out that it might as reasonably be said that between the Creatour (for so the word was formerly spelt) and the creature there was but the difference of a single letter. In the course of the controversy, however, many of those who had originally been connected with the party of the Homoiousians or semi-Arians, as S. Basil and S. Cyril of Jerusalem, came gradually to understand the true meaning of the term 'Homoousios,' and as they understood it better, to overcome their objections to it, so that gradually during the latter half of the fourth century the semi-Arian party was broken up, and, while some drifted further away from the orthodox faith and were merged in the Arians, others were absorbed by the Catholic party, and accepted the full faith as established at Nicæa. The result of this was that in many places the local baptismal Creed was enlarged by the incorporation with it of the Nicene phraseology concerning the nature of the pre-Incarnate Christ; and further, since in the course of the controversy new forms of heresy had emerged against which the Nicene formulary offered no protection, it was found necessary to introduce fresh clauses

1 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap. xxi.

in some instances to guard against them. There was thus a revision on a tolerably wide scale of the existing Creeds in the latter part of the fourth century, which has left permanent traces on the expression of the Church's faith.

Three novel forms of heresy must here be mentioned, as having led to the expansion of the Creed.

Un

(1) The heresy of Marcellus of Ancyra in Galatia. Marcellus had been one of the principal champions of the faith in our Lord's true Godhead at Nicæa. happily, in the controversies that followed the Council, in endeavouring to refute the Arians he himself used language which laid him open to the charge of Sabellianism. What he really taught is not quite certain, but he appears to have drawn a distinction between 'the Word of God' and 'the Son,' and finally to have maintained a merely temporary connection between the two. The Logos (or Word) by a sort of “expansion" of the Divine unity became temporarily related to Jesus, Who, as the chosen organ for its manifestation, the man whose being was filled with its presence, was called the "Son" and "Image" of God; but from Whom, in God's appointed time, the Logos would withdraw itself, and relapse by a movement of "contraction" into the bosom of Divinity.'1 Such a view involved the denial of the eternity of Christ's reign, which, according to Marcellus, would come definitely to an end when the Son's distinct personality ceased, and the Logos was absorbed into the Godhead.

1 Bright, Age of the Fathers, i. 157.