16 Meletians and Donatists-The Church injured by failings in her adherents.

Thebaid, who had been excommunicated for apostasy and idolatry by St. Peter, Bishop of Alexandria, about A.D. 302,2 and had formed a schismatical sect against him and the Church. At the Council of Nicæa Meletius himself was deposed as the leader of the schism, but the Meletian Bishops were received to communion, and were allowed to retain their Episcopal dignity, but not to exercise any Episcopal functions except in subordination to the Catholic Bishops, and to the authority of the Bishop of Alexandria. We shall see in the following pages that they were thorns in the side of Athanasius.

The rise of the Donatistic sectaries has been already described. They also were enlisted by Arianism as its allies against him.

Nor did Arianism scruple to excite the Jews and Heathens to acts of violence and outrage against him and the faithful, especially at Alexandria.

10. Besides, as we shall see, the cause of Truth was damaged by failings in some of its leading adherents, by unsoundness in some articles of faith, or by excess of zeal and lack of wisdom and charity.

This was remarkably exemplified in the cases of Marcellus, Bishop of Ancyra in Galatia, and of Lucifer, Bishop of Cagliari in Sardinia.

Marcellus had been a courageous champion of the Church against the Sophist Asterius, and he was a fellow-labourer and fellow-sufferer with Athanasius in his conflicts and persecution. But he exposed him

2 S. Athanas. Apol. c. Arian. § 59. The edition of Athanasius to which I refer is that of the learned Benedictine Montfaucon, Patav. 1777, 4 vols. folio.

Theodoret, i. 8; Socrat. i. 9.

Above, vol. i. pp. 321, 401, 404, 408.

Luciferians: Fall of Hosius and Liberius.

17

self to the charge of Sabellianism and Photinianism, and thus he created prejudice against the cause which he sought to defend against its Arian opponents.5

Lucifer of Cagliari was a bold and heroic confessor of the faith; but he injured the Church by his intemperate and passionate invectives against the Emperor Constantius, and by the rigorous severity with which he alienated those who might have been recovered to its communion from Arianism, and which betrayed him into the formation of a rival sect bearing his name, and not very different in its principles from the schisms of Novatianism and Donatism."

II. But the Church had severer trials in the fall of Hosius, the Bishop of Corduba, in A.D. 357, and soon after it, of Liberius, Bishop of Rome, and in the total collapse of the Catholic Bishops at Ariminum' in A.D. 359.

Hosius had been a confessor in heathen persecution under Maximian; he had been the trusted friend and adviser of Constantine, and had taken the lead at the Nicene Council, in framing the Nicene Creed ; and had afterwards presided at the Council of Sardica, A.D. 344. By reason of his great age (he was more than a hundred years old at the time of his fall), his piety, learning, and dignity, he was regarded as the spiritual "Father of Bishops," as Athanasius calls him, and of all Christendom.10 But wearied out by a year's banishment, broken in health, and racked

Epiphan. Hær. 72. S. Hilary, Frag. ii. p. 639, ed. Migne.

6 See S. Jerome's dialogue c. Luciferianos, tom. iv. p. 300, ed. Bened. Paris, 1706; and below, p. 32.

7 Rimini in Italy.

8 See above, vol. i. pp. 402, 422, 447.

Athanas. ad Monachos, § 46.

10 See Hooker's description of him, book V. ch. xlii.

VOL. II.

с

18

Fall of Hosius; and of Liberius.

by torture, he at length, in A.D. 357, yielded to the threats and temptations of the Emperor, and subscribed at Sirmium a Creed framed by Valens, Ursacius, and Potamius, the bitter enemies of Athanasius, which expressly rejected the term consubstantial, and thus renounced in its vital point the faith of Nicæa. But he refused to condemn Athanasius. On these terms he obtained permission to return to his own country, where he soon afterwards died with words of remorse on his lips. According to Athanasius,1 he protested on his death-bed that what he had done had been extorted from him by force; he then condemned the Arian heresy and delivered a solemn warning against it.

The fall of Liberius, Bishop of Rome, was probably accelerated by that of Hosius. But it was still more calamitous. Liberius had mourned over the lapse of his own Legate, Vincent, Bishop of Capua; he had nobly resisted Constantius face to face at Milan, when the Emperor told him that he should consider a victory over Athanasius to be a nobler triumph than over any of his enemies in battle 3-such as Magnentius or Silvanus. Liberius stood firm and defended Athanasius, and rejected all the overtures of the Emperor, and was banished by him to Beroa in Thrace.

But at length in A.D. 358, after two years' exile, he also was worn out by privation and hardship, and by threats of death.4 He longed to return to Rome. Demophilus, Bishop of Beroa, was at his side, and

,1 Ibid. § 45.

2 Hilar. Fragment vi. p. 676, where Liberius says, in writing to Hosius, that "he had resolved to die rather than follow his example." 3 Theodoret, ii. 13. 4 Ath. ad Mon. § 41.

Apostasy at Ariminum.

19

tempted him to subscribe an Arian confession. In the words of a Roman Catholic Church Historian," "Liberius renounced the communion of Athanasius, and embraced that of the Easterns, that is of the Arians. He addressed a letter to the Emperor in which he requested to be restored to his see. He also wrote thus to the Easterns, 'I do not defend Athanasius, whom I received to communion because my predecessor, Julius, Bishop of Rome, had done so. But now it has so pleased God that I am persuaded that you have condemned him justly, and I have at once assented to your judgment, and I reject him from communion. And since our brother Demophilus has proposed to me the true Catholic faith, which many of our brother Bishops have examined at Sirmium, I have accepted it willingly, and have nothing to say against it.'"

Liberius wrote also to his former Legate, Vincent, Bishop of Capua, who was in favour with the Emperor, to the same effect, and solicited his influence with Constantius, that he might be delivered from his exile and confinement, and return to his see at Rome; and he charged him to communicate to all the Bishops of Campania the contents of his letter. "Thus it was," adds Fleury, "that Liberius abandoned S. Athanasius, whose cause was inseparable from that of the true faith.""

12. But the n almost total pros Ariminum, A.D. 35

575

calamity of all was the

20

Wreck of the faith at Rimini. S. Greg. Nazianzen.

of Constantius and the accession of Julian to the imperial throne.

The causes of this ruin will be narrated in their proper place in the following pages. Suffice it now. to describe it in the words of three ancient authors.

S. Gregory Nazianzen, whose father was one who fell in that rout of the Episcopate, describes it as an earthquake; "all the Bishops became subject to the sway of time; other difference there was none among them, except that some fell away sooner than the rest, and some after the others; and that some were leaders in the band of impiety, and others were in the second rank, either cast down by fear, or enslaved by penury, or ensnared by flattery, or beguiled through simplicity-which was the most venial case of all."7

S. Jerome writes more fully as follows:-"When the Council of Ariminum (or Rimini) was over, all the Bishops returned with joy to their provinces. The Emperor (Constantius) and all good men had one common desire, that the East should be united with the West. But evil deeds do not long lie hid. A wound being ill scarred over soon discharges its purulent virus; Valens and Ursacius, and their Arian accomplices in impiety, vaunted their victory, and declared that in the Council of Rimini they had not denied the Son of God to be a creature, but only to be a creature like other creatures.

7 S. Greg. Nazian. Orat. xxi. de Athan. § 24, p. 401, ed. Bened. Richard Hooker's celebrated description of the Council of Ariminum in book v. chap. xlii. is little more than a literal translation from Gregory Nazianzen, whose name is not mentioned by Hooker nor in any edition of Hooker's works. This is one of several similar instances in Hooker's writings; see above, vol. i. p. 282 and p. 387. And may I refer to my Introduction to the Psalms, p. xv, where Hooker's beautiful encomium on the Psalms is merely a paraphrase from S. Basil?