meetings, whether public or secret, by day or by night, in cities or in the country, were equally proscribed by the edicts of Theodosius:  and the building or ground, which had been used for that illegal purpose, was forfeited to the imperial domain.  It was supposed, that the error of the heretics could proceed only from the obstinate temper of their minds; and that such a temper was a fit object of censure and punishment....  The sectaries were gradually disqualified for the possession of honourable or lucrative employments; and Theodosius was satisfied with his own justice, when he decreed, that as the Eunonians distinguished the nature of the Son from that of the Father, they should be incapable of making their wills, or of receiving any advantages from testamentary donations” (Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall,” vol. iii. pp. 412, 413).

One important event of this century must not be omitted, the dispersion of the great Alexandrine library, collected by the Ptolemies.  In the siege of Alexandria by Julius Caesar, the Philadelphian library in the museum, containing some 400,000 volumes, had been burned; but there still remained the “daughter library” in the Serapion, containing about 300,000 books.  During the episcopate of Theophilus, predecessor of Cyril, a riot took place between the Christians and the Pagans, and the latter “held the Serapion as their head-quarters.  Such were the disorder and bloodshed that the emperor had to interfere.  He despatched a rescript to Alexandria, enjoining the bishop, Theophilus, to destroy the Serapion; and the great library, which had been collected by the Ptolemies, and had escaped the fire of Julius Caesar, was by that fanatic dispersed” ("Conflict of Religion and Science,” p. 54), A.D. 389.  To Christian bigotry it is that we owe the loss of these rich treasures of antiquity.

Heresies grew and strengthened during this fourth century.  Chief leader in the heretic camp was Arius, a presbyter of Alexandria; he asserted that the Son, although begotten of the Father before the creation of aught else, was not “of the same substance” as the Father, but only “of like substance;” a vast number of the Christians embraced his definition, and thus began the long struggle between the Arians and the Catholics.  Arius also “took the ground that there was a time when, from the very nature of sonship, the Son did not exist, and a time at which he commenced to be, asserting that it is the necessary condition of the filial relation that a father must be older than his son.  But this assertion evidently denied the co-eternity of the three persons of the Trinity; it suggested a subordination or inequality among them, and indeed implied a time when the Trinity did not exist.  Hereupon the bishop, who had been the successful competitor against Arius [for the episcopate], displayed his rhetorical powers in public debates on the question, and, the strife spreading, the Jews and Pagans, who formed a very large portion of the population of Alexandria,