Moreover, in the year 381 he assembled a general council of one hundred and fifty bishops at his capital, to finish the work of the Council of Nice, and in which Arianism was condemned.  In the space of fifteen years seven imperial edicts were fulminated against those who maintained that the Son was inferior to the Father.  A fine equal to two thousand dollars was imposed on every person who should receive or promote an Arian ordination.  The Arians were forbidden to assemble together in their churches, and by a sort of civil excommunication they were branded with infamy by the magistrates, and rendered incapable of civil offices of trust and emolument.  Capital punishment even was inflicted on Manicheans.

So it would appear that Theodosius inaugurated religious persecution for honest opinions, and his edicts were similar in spirit to those of Louis XIV. against the Protestants,—­a great flaw in his character, but for which he is lauded by the Catholic historians.  The eloquent Flechier enlarges enthusiastically on the virtues of his private life, on his chastity, his temperance, his friendship, his magnanimity, as well as his zeal in extinguishing heresy.  But for him, Arianism might possibly have been the established religion of the Empire, since not only the dialectical Greeks, but the sensuous Goths, inclined to that creed.  Ulfilas, in his conversion of those barbarians, had made them the supporters of Arianism, not because they understood the subtile distinctions which theologians had made, but because it was the accepted and fashionable faith of Constantinople.  Spain, however, through the commanding influence of Hosius, adhered to the doctrines of Athanasius, while the eloquence of the commanding intellects of the age was put forth in behalf of Trinitarianism.  The great leader of Arianism had passed away when Augustine dictated to the Christian world from the little town of Hippo, and Jerome transplanted the monasticism of the East into the West.  At Tours Martin defended the same cause that Augustine had espoused in Africa; while at Milan, the court capital of the West, the venerable Ambrose confirmed Italy in the Latin creed.  In Alexandria the fierce Theophilus suppressed Arianism with the same weapons that he had used in extirpating the worship of Isis and Osiris.  Chrysostom at Antioch was the equally strenuous advocate of the Athanasian Creed.  We are struck with the appearance of these commanding intellects in the last days of the Empire,—­not statesmen and generals, but ecclesiastics and churchmen, generally agreed in the interpretation of the faith as declared by Paul, and through whose counsels the emperor was unquestionably governed.  In all matters of religion Theodosius was simply the instrument of the great prelates of the age,—­the only great men that the age produced.