[Sidenote:  (2.) Eustathius.]

The dispute with Anthimus was little more than a personal quarrel, so that it was soon forgotten.  The old Semiarian Eustathius of Sebastia was able to give more serious annoyance.  He was a man too active to be ignored, too unstable to be trusted, too famous for ascetic piety to be lightly made an open enemy.  His friendship was compromising, his enmity dangerous.  We left him professing the Nicene faith before the council of Tyana.  For the next three years we lose sight of him.  He reappears as a friend of Basil in 370, and heartily supported him in his strife with Valens.  Eustathius was at any rate no time-server.  He was drawn to Basil by old friendship and a common love of asceticism, but almost equally repelled by the imperious orthodoxy of a stronger will than his own.  And Basil for a long time clung to his old teacher, though the increasing distrust of staunch Nicenes like Theodotus of Nicopolis was beginning to attack himself.  His peacemaking was worse than a failure.  First he offended Theodotus, then he alienated Eustathius.  The suspicious zeal of Theodotus was quieted in course of time, but Eustathius never forgave the urgency which wrung from him his signature to a Nicene confession.  He had long been leaning the other way, and now he turned on Basil with all the bitterness of broken friendship.  To such a man the elastic faith of the Homoeans was a welcome refuge.  If they wasted little courtesy on their convert, they did not press him to strain his conscience by signing what he ought not to have signed.

[Sidenote:  Apollinarius of Laodicea.]

The Arian controversy was exhausted for the present, and new questions were already beginning to take its place.  While Basil and Eustathius were preparing the victory of asceticism in the next generation, Apollinarius had already essayed the christological problem of Ephesus and Chalcedon; and Apollinarius was no common thinker.  If his efforts were premature, he at least struck out the most suggestive of the ancient heresies.  Both in what he saw and in what he failed to see, his work is full of meaning for our own time.  Apollinarius and his father were Christian literary men of Laodicea in Syria, and stood well to the front of controversy in Julian’s days.  When the rescript came out which forbade the Galileans to teach the classics, they promptly undertook to form a Christian literature by throwing Scripture into classical forms.  The Old Testament was turned into Homeric verse, the New into Platonic dialogues.  Here again Apollinarius was premature.  There was indeed no reason why Christianity should not have as good a literature as heathenism, but it would have to be a growth of many ages.  In doctrine Apollinarius was a staunch Nicene, and one of the chief allies of Athanasius in Syria.  But he was a Nicene of an unusual type, for the side of Arianism which specially attracted his attention was its denial of the Lord’s true manhood.  It will be remembered