and he never lowers them to resent the evil wrought by men of yesterday.  Therefore neither lapse of time nor multiplicity of trials could ever quench in Athanasius the pure spirit of hope which glows in his youthful work.  Slight as our sketch of it has been, it will be enough to show his combination of religious intensity with a speculative insight and a breadth of view reminding us of Origen.  If he fails to reach the mystery of sinlessness in man, and is therefore not quite free from a Sabellianising view of the Lord’s humanity as a mere vesture of his divinity, he at least rises far above the barren logic of the Arians.  We shall presently have to compare him with the next great Eastern thinker, Apollinarius of Laodicea.

[Sidenote:  Attraction of Arianism:  (1.) For superficial thinkers.]

Yet there were many men whom Arianism suited by its shallowness.  As soon as Christianity was established as a lawful worship by the edict of Milan in 312, the churches were crowded with converts and inquirers of all sorts.  A church which claims to be universal cannot pick and choose like a petty sect, but must receive all comers.  Now these were mostly heathens with the thinnest possible varnish of Christianity, and Arianism enabled them to use the language of Christians without giving up their heathen ways of thinking.  In other words, the world was ready to accept the gospel as a sublime monotheism, and the Lord’s divinity was the one great stumbling-block which seemed to hinder its conversion.  Arianism was therefore a welcome explanation of the difficulty.  Nor was the attraction only for nominal Christians like these.  Careless thinkers—­sometimes thinkers who were not careless—­might easily suppose that Arianism had the best of such passages as ’The Lord created me,’[3] or ’The Father is greater than I.’[4] Athanasius constantly complains of the Arian habit of relying on isolated passages like these without regard to their context or to the general scope and drift of Scripture.

[Footnote 3:  Prov. viii. 22, LXX mistranslation.]

[Footnote 4:  John xiv. 28.]

[Sidenote:  (2.) To thoughtful men.]

Nor was even this all.  The Lord’s divinity was a real difficulty to thoughtful men.  They were still endeavouring to reconcile the philosophical idea of God with the fact of the incarnation.  In point of fact, the two things are incompatible, and one or the other would have to be abandoned.  The absolute simplicity of the divine nature is consistent with a merely external Trinity, or with a merely economic Trinity, with an Arian Trinity of one increate and two created beings, or with a Sabellian Trinity of three temporal aspects of the one God revealed in history; but not with a Christian Trinity of three eternal aspects of the divine nature, facing inward on each other as well as outward on the world.  But this was not yet fully understood.  The problem was to explain the Lord’s distinction from the