The vitality of a doctrine, how tested. 361 and upon which it ultimately reposes, are separately and constantly examined. It may be that certain elements of the doctrine, essential to its perfect representation, are rejected altogether. It may be that all its constitutive elements are retained, while the proportions in which they are blended are radically altered. It may be that an impulse is given to some active intellectual solvent, hitherto dormant, but from the first latent in the constitution of the doctrine, and likely, according to any ordinary human estimate, to break it up. Or some point of attraction between the doctrine and a threatening philosophy outside it is discovered and insisted on; and the philosophy, in a patronizing spirit, proposes to meet the doctrine half way, and to ratify one half of it if the other may be abandoned. Or some subtle intellectual poison is injected into the doctrine; and while men imagine that they are only adapting it to the temper of an age, or to the demands of a line of thought, its glow and beauty are forfeited, or its very life and heart are eaten out. Then for awhile its shell or its skeleton lies neglected by the side of the great highway of thought; until at length some one of those adventurers who in every age devote themselves to the manufacture of eclectic systems assigns to the intellectual fossil a place of honour in his private museum, side by side with the remains of other extinct theories, to which in its lifetime it was fundamentally opposed. But even if a doctrine be sufficiently compact and strong to resist internal decomposition, it must in any case be prepared to encounter the shock of opposition from without. To no doctrine is it given to be absolutely inoffensive; and therefore sooner or later every doctrine is opposed. Every doctrine, however frail and insignificant it may be, provokes attacks by the mere fact of its existence. It challenges a certain measure of attention which is coveted by some other doctrines. It takes up a certain amount of mental room which other doctrines would fain appropriate, if indeed it does not jostle inconveniently against them, or contradict them outright. Thus it rouses against itself resentment, or, at any rate, opposition; and this opposition is reinforced by an appetite which is shared in by those who hold the opposed doctrine no less than by those who oppose it. The craving for novelty is by no means peculiar to quickwitted races like the Athenians of the apostolical age or the French of our own day. It is profoundly and universally human; and it enters into our appreciation of subject-matters the most various. Novelty confers a charm upon high efforts of thought and enquiry as well as upon works of art or of imagination, or even upon fashions in amuse 362 ment or in dress. To treat this yearning for novelty as though it were only a vicious frivolity is to overlook its profound significance. For, even in its lowest and unloveliest forms, it is a living and perpetual witness to the original nobility of the soul of man. It is the restlessness of a desire which One Being alone can satisfy; it reminds us that the Infinite One has made us for Himself, and that no object, person, or doctrine, that is merely finite and earthly, can take His place in our heart and thought, and bid us finally be still. And therefore as man passes through life on his short and rapid pilgrimage, unless his eye be fixed on that treasure in heaven which neither moth nor rust doth corrupt,' he is of necessity the very slave of novelty. Each candidate for his admiration wins from him, it may be, a passing glance of approval; but, unsatisfied at heart, he is ever seeking for some new stimulant to his evanescent sympathies. He casts to the winds the faded flower which he had but lately stooped to gather with such eager enthusiasm; he buries beneath the waves the useless pebble which, when his eye first detected it sparkling on the shore, had yielded him a moment of such bright enjoyment. Nothing human can insure its life against the attractions of something more recent than itself in point of origin; no doctrine of earthly mould can hope to escape the sentence of superannuation when it is fairly confronted with the intellectual creations of an age later than its own. A human doctrine may live for a few years, or it may live for centuries. Its duration will depend partly upon the amount of absolute truth which it embodies, and partly upon the strength of the rivals with which it is brought into competition. But it cannot always satisfy the appetite for novelty; its day of extinction can only be deferred. The vitality of a doctrine, how tested. οὐκ ἔχω προσεικάσαι πάντ ̓ ἐπισταθμώμενος, πλὴν Διὸς, εἰ τὸ μάταν ἀπὸ φροντίδος ἄχθος So it must ever man authorship. fare with a religious dogma of purely huIn obedience to the lapse of time it must b Esch. Ag. 163–171. Doctrine of Christ's Divinity, how tested. 363 of necessity be modified, corrupted, revolutionized, and then yield to some stronger successor. 'Our little systems have their day, They have their day and cease to be.' This is the true voice of human speculation on Divine things, conscious that it is human, conscious of its weakness, and mindful of its past and ever-accumulating experience. He only, 'with Whom is no variableness neither shadow of turning,' can be the Author of a really unchanging doctrine; and, as a matter of historical fact, His truth endureth from generation to generation.' When the doctrine of our Lord's Divinity entered into the world of human thought, it was not screened from the operation of the antagonistic and dissolvent influences which have just been noticed. It was confronted with the passion for novelty beneath the eyes of the Apostles themselves. The passion for novelty at Colossæ appears to have combined a licentious fertility of the religious imagination with a taste for such cosmical speculations as were current in that age; while in the Galatian Churches it took the form of a return to the discarded ceremonial of the Jewish law. In both cases the novel theory was opposed to the apostolical account of our Lord's personal dignity; and in another generation the wild imaginings of a Basilides or of a Valentinus illustrated the attractive force of a new fashion in Christological speculation still more powerfully. Somewhat later the dialectical habits of the Alexandrian writers subjected the doctrine to a searching analysis, while the neo-Platonic philosophy brought a powerful intellectual sympathy to bear upon it, which, as an absorbing or distorting influence, might well have been fatal to a human dogma. Lastly, the doctrine was directly opposed by a long line of Humanitarian teachers, reaching, with but few intermissions, from the Ebionitic period to the Arian. In the history of the doctrine of Christ's Divinity the Arian heresy was the climax of difficulty and of triumph; it tested the doctrine at one and the same time in each of the three modes which have been noticed. Arianism was ostentatiously anxious to appear to be an original speculation, and accordingly it taunted the Nicene fathers with their intellectual poverty; it branded them as ἀφελεῖς καὶ ἰδιῶται because they adhered to the ground of handing on simply what they had received. Its method of conducting discussion is traceable to the schools of the Sophists 364 Effects of Opposition. at Antioch; and by this method, as well as by the assumption that certain philosophical placita were granted, Arianism endeavoured to kill the doctrine from within by a destructive analysis. And it need scarcely be added that Arianism inherited and intensified the direct opposition which had been offered to the doctrine by earlier heresies; Arianism is immortalized, however ingloriously, in those sufferings, in those struggles, in those victories of the great Athanasius, of which its own bitter hostility to our Lord's Essential Godhead was the immediate cause. That such a doctrine as our Lord's Divinity should be thus opposed was not unnatural. It is in itself so startling, so awful; it endows the man who honestly and intelligently believes it with a conception of the worth and drift of Christianity, so altogether unique; it is so utterly intolerable if you admit a suspicion of its being false; it is so necessarily exacting when once you have recognised it as true; it makes such large and immediate demands, not merely upon the reason and the imagination, but also upon the affections and the will; that a specific opposition to it, as distinct from a professed general opposition to the religion of which it is the very heart and soul, is only what might have been expected. Certainly, such a doctrine could not at first bring peace on earth; rather it could not but bring division. It could not but divide families, cities, nations, continents; it could not but arm against itself the edge and point of every weapon that might be forged or whetted by the ingenuity of a passionate animosity. It could not but have collapsed utterly and vanished away when confronted with the heat of opposition which it provoked, had it not descended from the Source of Truth, had it not reposed upon an absolute and indestructible basis. The Arian controversy broke upon it as an intellectual storm, the violence of which must have shattered any human theory. But when the storm had spent itself, the doctrine emerged from the conciliar decisions of the fourth century as luminous and perfect as it had been when it was proclaimed by St. Paul and St. John. Resistance does but strengthen truth which it cannot overthrow: and when the doctrine had defied the craving for novelty, the disintegrating force of hostile analysis, and the vehement onslaught of passionate denunciation, it was seen to be vitally unlike those philosophical speculations which might have been confused with it by a superficial observer. The doctrine was unaltered; it still involved and excluded precisely what it had excluded and involved from the first. But henceforth it was to be held with a clearer recognition of its real Triumph of the Doctrine. The Homoousion. 365 frontier, and with a stronger sense of the necessity for insisting upon that recognition. In the Homoousion, after such hesitation as found expression at Antioch, the Church felt that she had lighted upon a symbol practically adapted to tell forth the truth that never had been absent from her heart and mind, and withal, capable of resisting the intellectual solvents which had seemed to threaten that truth with extinction. The Homoousion did not change, it protected the doctrine. It clothed the doctrine in a vesture of language which rendered it intelligible to a new world of thought while preserving its strict unchanging identity. It translated the apostolical symbols of the Image and the Word of God into a Platonic equivalent; and it remains with us to this hour, in the very heart of our Creed, as the complete assertion of Christ's absolute oneness with the Essence of Deity, as the monument which records the greatest effort and the greatest defeat of its antagonist error, as the guarantee that the victorious truth maintains and will maintain an unshaken empire over the thought of Christendom. We are all sufficiently familiar with the line of criticism to which such a formula as the Homoousion is exposed in our day and generation. A contrast is depicted and insisted upon with more vehemence than accuracy, between the unfixed popular faith of Christians in the first age of the Church and the keen theological temper of the fourth century. It is said that the Church's earliest faith was unformed, simple, vague, too full of childlike wonder to analyse itself, too indeterminate to satisfy the requirements of a formalized theology. It is asserted that at Alexandria the Church learned how to fix her creed in precise, rigid, exclusive moulds; that she there gradually crystallized what had once been fluid, and cramped and fettered what had before been free. And it is insinuated that in this process, whereby the fresh faith of the infant Church was hardened into the creed of the Church of the Councils,' there was some risk, or more than risk, of an alteration or enlargement of the original faith. 'How do you know,' men ask, 'that the formulary which asserts Christ's Consubstantiality with the Father is really expressive of the simple faith in which the first Christians lived and died? Do not probabilities point the other way? Is it not likely that when this effort was made to fix the expression of the faith in an unchanging symbol, there was a simultaneous growth, however unsuspected and unrecognised, in the subjectmatter of the faith expressed? May not the hopes and feelings of a passionate devotion, as well as the inferential arguments of |