the reach of the officials.  This was the time when the ascetic spirit, which had long been hovering round the outskirts of Christianity, began to assume the form of monasticism.  There were monks in Egypt—­monks of Serapis—­before Christianity existed, and there may have been Christian monks by the end of the third century.  In any case, they make little show in history before the reign of Valens.  Paul of Thebes, Hilarion of Gaza, and even the great Antony are only characters in the novels of the day.  Now, however, there was in the East a real movement towards monasticism.  All parties favoured it.  The Semiarians were busy inside Mount Taurus; and though Acacians and Anomoeans held more aloof, they could not escape an influence which even Julian felt.  But the Nicene party was the home of the ascetics.  In an age of indecision and frivolity like the Nicene, the most earnest striving after Christian purity will often degenerate into its ascetic caricature.  Through the selfish cowardice of the monastic life we often see the loving sympathy of Christian self-denial.  Thus there was an element of true Christian zeal in the enthusiasm of the Eastern Churches; and thus it was that the rising spirit of asceticism naturally attached itself to the Nicene faith as the strongest moral power in Christendom.  It was a protest against the whole framework of society in that age, and therefore the alliance was cemented by a common enmity to the Arian Empire.  It helped much to conquer Arianism, but it left a lasting evil in the lowering of the Christian standard.  Henceforth the victory of faith was not to overcome the world, but to flee from it.  Even heathen immorality was hardly more ruinous than the unclean ascetic spirit which defames God’s holy ordinance as a form of sin which a too indulgent Lord will overlook.

[Sidenote:  New questions in controversy.]

Valens was only a catechumen, and had no policy to declare for the present.  Events therefore continued to develop naturally.  The Homoean bishops retained their sees, but their influence was fast declining.  The Anomoeans were forming a schism on one side, the Nicenes recovering power on the other.  Unwilling signatures to the Homoean creed were revoked in all directions.  Some even of its authors declared for Arianism with Euzoius, while others drew nearer to the Nicene faith like Acacius.  On all sides the simpler doctrines were driving out the compromises.  It was time for the Semiarians to bestir themselves if they meant to remain a majority in the East.  The Nicenes seemed daily to gain ground.  Lucifer had compromised them in one direction, Apollinarius in another, and even Marcellus had never been frankly disavowed; yet the Nicene cause advanced.  A new question, however, was beginning to come forward.  Hitherto the dispute had been on the person of the Lord, while that of the Holy Spirit was quite in the background.  Significant as is the tone of Scripture, the proof is not on the surface.  The divinity