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The second place in the kingdom should be his; he should have dominion over one half of the Arians; nay, he should share the Persian throne with Artaxerxes himself, and hold a rank and dignity only slightly inferior. Artaxerxes warmly encouraged him in his design, and in a little time it was successfully carried out.
A Trinitarian and a Catholic, he was shocked by the excesses of the persecution of the Arians, which could be only matched by the similar outrages with which these same Arians in the day of their power avenged their treatment on their brother Christians.
As the pagans and Arians of Alexandria were no longer worthy of his enmity, he fanned into a flame a new quarrel which was then breaking out in the Egyptian church. The monks of Upper Egypt, who were mostly ignorant and unlettered men, were anthropomorphites, or believers that God was in outward shape like a man.
Many large congregations of Gnostics and Arians maintained, after their conversion, the simple worship which had preceded their separation; and the Armenians, the most warlike subjects of Rome, were not reconciled, in the twelfth century, to the sight of images.
The crushing out of the Arians and of the Paulicians and suchlike heretics, and more particularly the systematic destruction by the orthodox of all heretical writings, had about it none of that quality of honest conviction which comes to those who have a real knowledge of God; it was a bawling down of dissensions that, left to work themselves out, would have spoilt good business; it was the fist of Nicolas of Myra over again, except that after the days of Ambrose the sword of the executioner and the fires of the book-burner were added to the weapon of the human voice.
The anathemas also are the Nicene with insertions which might have been made for the very purpose of letting the Arians escape. However, the conservatives were well satisfied with the Lucianic creed, and frequently refer to it with a veneration akin to that of Athanasius for the Nicene. But the wire-pullers were determined to upset it.
A rigorous law, which was published at Constantinople, to reduce the Arians by the dread of punishment within the pale of the church, awakened the just resentment of Theodoric, who claimed for his distressed brethren of the East the same indulgence which he had so long granted to the Catholics of his dominions.
In Leo's time the earth reeled beneath the tread of Attila, the city groaned beneath Genseric's hoof. And now three heretics despots, and ignoble despots, if ever such there were filled the sole imperial throne. Arians, closely connected by family ties and identical interests, divided the West among them.
I can describe but a few. The Emperor Honorius had conceded to the Visigoths all that portion of Gaul that lay between the Loire and the Pyrenees. The Visigoths were Arians.
'Sober Arians will rise up in judgment and condemn you for founding Christ's worship so meanly upon I know not what powers given after His resurrection. They founded it upon reasons antecedent to His incarnation, upon His being God before the world, and Creator of the world of His own power. Waterland showed his strength in defence as well as in attack.
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