It may not unreasonably be asked, Has not theology attempted too much?  Has it solved the truths for the solution of which it borrowed the aid of reason, and has it not often made a religion which is based on deductions and metaphysical distinctions as imperative as a religion based on simple declarations?  Has it not appealed to the head, when it should have appealed to the heart and conscience; and thus has not religion often been cold and dry and polemical, when it should have been warm, fervent, and simple?  Such seem to have been some of the effects of the Trinitarian controversy between Athanasius and Arius, and their respective followers even to our own times.  A belief in the unity of God, as distinguished from polytheism, has been made no more imperative than a belief in the supposed relations between the Father and the Son.  The real mission of Christ, to save souls, with all the glorious peace which salvation procures, has often been lost sight of in the covenant supposed to have been made between the Father and the Son.  Nothing could exceed the acrimony of the Nicene Fathers in their opposition to those who could not accept their deductions.  And the more subtile the distinctions the more violent were the disputes; until at last religious persecution marked the conduct of Christians towards each other,—­as fierce almost as the persecutions they had suffered from the Pagans.  And so furious was the strife between those theological disputants, estimable in other respects as were their characters, that even the Emperor Constantine at last lost all patience and banished Athanasius himself to a Gaulish city, after he had promoted him to the great See of Alexandria as a reward for his services to the Church at the Council of Nice.  To Constantine the great episcopal theologian was simply “turbulent,” “haughty,” “intractable.”

With the establishment of the doctrine of the Trinity by the Council of Nice, the interest in the reign of Constantine ceases, although he lived twelve years after it.  His great work as a Christian emperor was to unite the Church with the State.  He did not elevate the Church above the State; that was the work of the Mediaeval Popes.  But he gave external dignity to the clergy, of whom he was as great a patron as Charlemagne.  He himself was a sort of imperial Pope, attending to things spiritual as well as to things temporal.  His generosity to the Church made him an object of universal admiration to prelates and abbots and ecclesiastical writers.  In this munificent patronage he doubtless secularized the Church, and gave to the clergy privileges they afterwards abused, especially in the ecclesiastical courts.  But when the condition of the Teutonic races in barbaric times is considered, his policy may have proved beneficent.  Most historians consider that the elevation of the clergy to an equality with barons promoted order and law, especially in the absence of central governments.  If Constantine made a mistake in enriching and exalting the clergy, it was endorsed by Charlemagne and Alfred.