skill to explain the incarnation as the expression of the eternal divine nature.  But he did not see so well as Athanasius that sin is a mere intruder among men.  It was not a hopeful age in which he lived.  The world had gone a long way downhill since young Athanasius had sung his song of triumph over fallen heathenism.  Roman vice and Syrian frivolity, Eastern asceticism and Western legalism, combined to preach, in spite of Christianity, that the sinfulness of mankind is essential.  So instead of following out the pregnant hint of Athanasius that sin is no true part of human nature (else were God the author of evil), Apollinarius cut the knot by refusing the Son of Man a human spirit as a thing of necessity sinful.  Too thoughtful to slur over the difficulty like Pelagius, he was yet too timid to realize the possibility of a conquest of sin by man, even though that man were Christ himself.

[Sidenote:  The Apollinarians.]

Apollinarius and his school contributed not a little to the doctrinal confusion of the East.  His ideas were current for some time in various forms, and are attacked in some of the later works of Athanasius; but it was not till about 375 that they led to a definite schism, marked by the consecration of the presbyter Vitalis to the bishopric of Antioch.  From this time, Apollinarian bishops disputed many of the Syrian sees with Nicenes and Anomoeans.  Their adherents were also scattered over Asia, and supplied one more element of discord to the noisy populace of Constantinople.

[Sidenote:  Last years of Athanasius (366-373).]

The declining years of Athanasius were spent in peace.  Valens had restored him in good faith, and never afterwards molested him.  If Lucius the Arian returned to Alexandria to try his chance as bishop, the officials gave him no connivance—­nothing but sorely needed shelter from the fury of the mob.  Arianism was nearly extinct in Egypt.

[Sidenote:  Athanasius and Marcellus (before 371).]

One of his last public acts was to receive an embassy from Marcellus, who was still living in extreme old age at Ancyra.  Some short time before 371, the deacon Eugenius presented to him a confession on behalf of the ‘innumerable multitude’ who still owned Marcellus for their father.  ’We are not heretics, as we are slandered.  We specially anathematize Arianism, confessing, like our fathers at Nicaea, that the Son is no creature, but of the essence of the Father and co-essential with the Father; and by the Son we mean no other than the Word.  Next we anathematize Sabellius, for we confess the eternity and reality of the Son and the Holy Spirit.  We anathematize also the Anomoeans, in spite of their pretence not to be Arians.  We anathematize finally the Arianizers who separate the Word from the Son, giving the latter a beginning at the incarnation because they do not confess him to be very God.  Our own doctrine of the incarnation is that the Word did not