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Indeed, to Marcellus the Son of God is a mere phenomenon of time, and even the Word is as foreign to the divine essence as the Arian Son. If the one can only reveal in finite measure, the other gives but broken hints of an infinity beyond. Instead of destroying Arianism by the roots, Marcellus had fallen into something very like Sabellianism.

As soon, however, as the Christians were left alone, they started persecuting each other, and during the fourth century the Arian controversy re-echoed throughout the peninsula.

Apollinare Nuova; but why it is called new I do not know, as Theodoric built it for an Arian cathedral in about the year 500. It is a noble interior, having twenty-four marble columns of gray Cippolino, brought from Constantinople, with composite capitals, on each of which is an impost with Latin crosses sculptured on it.

Africa is a proof of this; having suffered more horrors from the Arian sect, whose doctrines were believed by the Vandals, than from any avarice or natural cruelty of the people themselves.

Then the Arian Vandals bitterly persecuted the Church in Africa, and the Visigoth Arians had possession of France from the Loire southwards, and of Spain. Nowhere in the whole world was there a Catholic prince. The north and east of France and Belgium was held by the still pagan Franks.

In Egypt, during the reign of Constantius, who succeeded his father Constantine, the hot-headed Jews of Alexandria provoked the enactment by that emperor of yet severer laws, by mingling themselves in the factions of Arians and Athanasians, which distracted that restless city. They joined with the pagans on the side of the Arian bishop, and committed frightful excesses.

The three principal leaders of the Catholics, Athanasius of Alexandria, Eustathius of Antioch, and Paul of Constantinople were deposed on various f accusations, by the sentence of numerous councils; and were afterwards banished into distant provinces by the first of the Christian emperors, who, in the last moments of his life, received the rites of baptism from the Arian bishop of Nicomedia.

It may be noted that with his pontificate closes the period of about twenty years, from 476 to 496, in which no single ruler of East or West, great or small, professed the Catholic faith. The eastern emperors were Eutychean; the new western rulers Arian, save when they were pagan. The next year the conversion of Clovis, with his Franks, opens a new series of events.

Peter had to any seemed to rule because he was seated on the pedestal of the Cæsarean empire, when that empire fell the Apostle alone remained to whom Christ gave the charge, whom He invested with the "great mantle". The bishop of the city in which an Arian Ostrogoth ruled supreme as to temporal things was acknowledged by the head of the empire, from whom the Ostrogoth derived his title, as the person in whom our Lord's word the creative word which founds an empire as it makes a world was accomplished, had been during five hundred years accomplished, would be for ever accomplished.

Neither of the two great Arian peoples had as yet a capital city, neither was united under a king: separated into numerous tribes, each under its chief, dispersed in scattered towns and villages, poorly fortified or not fortified at, all, they were in the same condition as the Nairi, the Qummukh, the Patena, the Hittites, and the other border races whose relative weakness Assyria had abundantly proved in a long course of wars wherein she had uniformly been the victor.