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They found Leontius already on his journey, and they overtook him at a critical moment. He was on the point of baptizing another Gregory, father of a much more celebrated Gregory, the future bishop of Nazianzen. A light, it was believed, shone from the water, which was only discerned by the sacred travellers. Leontius was claimed by the Arians, but still more decidedly by the orthodox.
Agatha, which belonged to the Arians; it helped him to fix his thoughts upon Veranilda, and silently he swore that no temptation should prevail against the fidelity due to his beloved.
LAST DAYS OF HEATHENISM. When Christianity had become powerful, its disciples forgot the precepts of their Master, and sometimes persecuted the heathen. Christian mobs demolished the old temples. The great temple of Serapis in Alexandria was destroyed, and the statue of the god was broken in pieces. Arians, too, he persecuted, but with less harshness.
The German Church histories, especially that of Neander, should be read; also, Cardinal Newman's History of the Arians. I need not remind the reader of the innumerable tracts and treatises on the doctrine of the Trinity. They comprise half the literature of the Middle Ages as well as of the Fathers. In a lecture I can only glance at some of the vital points.
It was natural that they should dislike the yoke of a Turanian people; and it was wise of them to make their effort to obtain their freedom before Parthia grew into a power against which revolt would be utterly hopeless. Hyrcania might now expect to be joined by the Medes, and even the Mardi, who were Arians like themselves, and could not yet have forgotten the pleasures of independence.
The Emperor thus won over, the Arians began to persecute and slander those who were faithful to the Church; several were even put to death. The Catholics, in desperation, resolved at last to send an embassy to Valens to ask for justice, eighty priests and clerics being chosen to make the petition.
At Antioch he saw the emperor Constantius; sustained, with modest firmness, the embraces and protestations of his master, and eluded the proposal of allowing the Arians a single church at Alexandria, by claiming, in the other cities of the empire, a similar toleration for his own party; a reply which might have appeared just and moderate in the mouth of an independent prince.
It was for this that the Manicheans and the Arians, who existed at the commencement of the Christian Era, derided these pretended miracles performed by the invocation of saints, and blamed those who invoked them after death and honored their relics.
Evidently, the Jews and Arians, when they became known to one another, recognized mutually the fact that they were worshippers of the same great Being. Hence the favor of the Persians towards the Jews, and the fidelity of the Jews towards the Persians. The Lord God of the Jews being recognized as identical with Ormazd, a sympathetic feeling united the peoples.
There is indeed another view of the economy brought out, in the course of the same dissertation on the subject, in my History of the Arians, which has afforded matter for the latter imputation; but I reserve it for the concluding portion of my reply.
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