A universal cry of horror rose from the conservative ranks to greet the new Sabellius, the Jew and worse than Jew, the shameless miscreant who had forsworn the Son of God.  Marcellus had confused together all the errors he could find.  The faith itself was at peril if blasphemies like these were to be sheltered behind the rash decisions of Nicaea.  So thought the conservatives, and not without a reason, though their panic was undignified from the first, and became a positive calamity when taken up by political adventurers for their own purposes.  As far as doctrine went, there was little to choose between Marcellus and Arius.  Each held firmly the central error of the conservatives, and rejected as illogical the modifications and side views by which they were finding their way to something better.  Both parties, says Athanasius, are equally inconsistent.  The conservatives, who refuse eternal being to the Son of God, will not endure to hear that his kingdom is other than eternal; while the Marcellians, who deny his personality outright, are equally shocked at the Arian limitation of it to the sphere of time.  Nor had Marcellus escaped the difficulties of Arius.  If, for example, the idea of an eternal Son is polytheistic, nothing is gained by transferring the eternity to an impersonal Word.  If the generation of the Son is materializing, so also is the coming forth of the Word.  If the work of creation is unworthy of God, it may as well be delegated to a created Son as to a transitory Word.  So far Athanasius.  Indeed, to Marcellus the Son of God is a mere phenomenon of time, and even the Word is as foreign to the divine essence as the Arian Son.  If the one can only reveal in finite measure, the other gives but broken hints of an infinity beyond.  Instead of destroying Arianism by the roots, Marcellus had fallen into something very like Sabellianism.  He reaches no true mediation, no true union of God and man, for he makes the incarnation a mere theophany, the flesh a useless burden, to be one day laid aside.  The Lord is our Redeemer and the conqueror of death and Satan, but there is no room for a second Adam, the organic head of regenerate mankind.  The redemption becomes a mere intervention from without, not also the planting of a power of life within, which will one day quicken our mortal bodies too.

[Sidenote:  (3.) Athanasius.]

Marcellus had fairly exposed himself to a doctrinal attack; other methods were used with Athanasius.  They had material enough without touching doctrine.  His election was disputed:  Meletians and Arians complained of oppression:  there were some useful charges of magic and political intrigue.  At first, however, the Meletians could not even get a hearing from the Emperor.  When Eusebius of Nicomedia took up their cause, they fared a little better.  The attack had to be put off till the winter of 331, and was even then a failure.  Their charges were partly answered by two presbyters of Athanasius who were on the spot; and when the bishop himself was summoned to court, he soon completed their discomfiture.  As Constantine was now occupied with the Gothic war, nothing more could be done till 334.  When, however, Athanasius was ordered to attend a council at Caesarea, he treated it as a mere cabal of his enemies, and refused to appear.