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The controversy respecting Easter, A.D. 109, shows, however, how soon the disposition for Western supremacy was exhibited, Victor, the Bishop of Rome, requiring the Asiatic bishops to conform to the view of his Church respecting the time at which the festival of Easter should be observed, and being resisted therein by Polycrates, the Bishop of Ephesus, on behalf of the Eastern churches, the feud continuing until the determination of the Council of Nicea.
Mosheim, the historian, to whom I have more particularly referred above, speaking of these times, remarks that "there was nothing to exclude the ignorant from ecclesiastical preferment; the savage and illiterate party, who looked on all kinds of learning, particularly philosophy, as pernicious to piety, was increasing;" and, accordingly, "the disputes carried on in the Council of Nicea offered a remarkable example of the greatest ignorance and utter confusion of ideas, particularly in the language and explanations of those who approved of the decisions of that council."
Nevertheless, to compose the matter somewhat, he sent Hosius, the Bishop of Cordova, to Alexandria; but, finding that the remedy was altogether inadequate, he was driven at last to the memorable expedient of summoning the Council of Nicea, A.D. 325.
These paltry Greeks43 are, I know, immoderately fond of gymnastic diversions, and therefore, perhaps, the citizens of Nicea have planned a more magnificent building for this purpose than is necessary; however, they must be content with such as will be sufficient to answer the purpose for which it is intended.
After a siege of seven weeks, Nicea was surrendered, not, however, into the hands of the European soldiers who had conducted the siege, but to the shrewd Alexius. At Doryleum, in a desperate battle the Turks were defeated; but, on their march eastward, they wasted the lands which they left behind them. The crusaders suffered severely from disease consequent on the heat.
This was, that the genuine doctrines of Christianity had been lost even before the time of the Council of Nicea; that the Holy Ghost animates the whole system of Nature, like a soul of the world, and that, with the Christ, it will be absorbed, at the end of all things, into the substance of the Deity, from which they had emanated. For this he was roasted to death over a slow fire.
Our terminus ad quem will be the Council of Nicea. The reason for this is in part the demands of time and space, and in part the fact that it will avoid needless and tedious repetition. The use of the theistic argument for some time after the Nicene period is fairly homogeneous, and presents no important new considerations.
There originated that desperate conflict which compelled Constantine the Great to summon the Council of Nicea, to settle, by a formulary or creed, the essentials of our faith. But it was not alone as regards theology that Alexandria exerted a power on subsequent ages; her influence was as strongly marked in the impression it gave to science.
The Council of Nicea had scarcely adjourned, when it was plain to all impartial men that, as a method of establishing a criterion of truth in religious matters, such councils were a total failure. The minority had no rights which the majority need respect.
In the Middle Ages the one showed itself in councils like those of Nicea and Ephesus, in political popes like Gregory VII. and Innocent III., in Isidorian decretals, excommunications, interdicts, tortures, indulgences; the other in our mediaeval cathedrals, in the poetry of a Dante, the paintings of a Giotto and a Raphael, the sculpture of a Michael Angelo, the music of a Palestrina, and our politician might then ask himself which he thought had been the more beneficial as a social force.
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