An essay read before the University Circle, of San JosÉ, California.

“There are four things,” says Hooker, “which concur to make complete the whole state of our Lord: His Deity, Manhood, the conjunction of both, and the distinction of one from the other.”

“Four principal heresies have withstood the truth: Arians, against the deity of Christ (denying that he was co-eternal and co-essential with the Father);

“Apollinarians, maiming his human nature (denying that he had a human soul);

“Nestorians, rending Christ asunder, and dividing him into two persons (one divine and the other human);

“The followers of Eutyches, by confounding in his person those natures which they should distinguish (asserting that his human nature was absorbed in the divine, and objecting to any distinction between the two).

“Against these there have been four most famous councils:

“1. Nice against the Arians, A. D. 325.

“2. Constantinople against the Apollinarians, A. D. 381.

“3. Ephesus against the Nestorians, A. D. 431.

“4. Chalcedon against the Eutychians, A. D. 451.”

Upon the theme of the first of these great Ecumenical Councils, the present paper will be a compilation.

A momentous era has arrived in the history of the church and of the world. For the first time a Christian ruler has come to the throne of the CÆsars.

With his chosen standard of the cross, Constantine has subdued the opposing factions—in the Roman empire, and over his vast realm there goes the edict that sets the Christians free from Pagan tyranny and persecution.

The church has grown through three centuries of stern conflict with the error and darkness, the evils and wrongs of the world, to be a mighty power in the earth.

Her course through suffering and toil, along a path tracked with the blood of the martyrs, has been a march of victory and conquest. A long list of eminent names is on her calendar. But now in the period of emancipation and prosperity she is beset by a complication of new dangers. Alliance with the state exposes her to a strain of corrupting influences. In the removal of compacting pressure from without, dissensions spring up within. Factions in the empire having been overcome, Constantine finds himself compelled to deal with factions in the church.

In Alexandria, the most learned see of Christendom, a difference of view and a violent discussion had sprung up on the doctrine of the Trinity. The schism extended until the whole church became agitated over the question.

Arius, one of the prime movers in it, reasoning upon the relation of the terms Father and Son, arrived at the conclusion that the Son, though the first born of beings, did not exist from eternity. “The controversy turned,” says Dean Stanley, in his “History of the Eastern Church,” “on the relations of the divine persons in the Trinity, not only before the incarnation, before creation, before time, but before the first beginnings of time. ‘There was,’ the Arian doctrine did not venture to say a time—but ‘there was when he was not.’ It was the excess of dogmatism upon the most abstract words in the most abstract region of human thought.”

But subtle and abstract as the question was, there was thought to be involved in it the root of a perilous departure from sound Christian faith. It touched the most central and fundamental doctrine of the Christian religion. Hence it engaged the profoundest thought and solicitude of the most powerful minds of that age; and the first general council was called, in order to bring the united wisdom of the church to bear upon the settlement of the question.

The council met at Nice in the year 325.

The place selected was not far from Nicomedia, then the capital of the East. The number of bishops from all parts of the empire is supposed to have been about 318, with a retinue of presbyters and attendants amounting to 2,000.

“There were present the learned and the illiterate, courtiers and peasants, old and young, aged bishops on the verge of the grave, and beardless deacons just entering on their office. It was an assembly in which the difference between age and youth was of more than ordinary significance, coinciding with a marked transition in the history of the world. The new generation had been brought up in peace and quiet. They could just remember the joy diffused through the Christian communities by the edict of toleration published in their boyhood. They had themselves suffered nothing. Not so the older and by far the larger part of the assembly. They had lived through the last and worst of the persecutions, and they now came, like a regiment out of some frightful siege or battle, decimated and mutilated by the tortures or the hardships they had undergone. Most of the older members had lost a friend or a brother. Some bore on their backs and sides the wounds inflicted by the instruments of torture. Some had suffered the searing of the sinews of the leg, to prevent their escape from working in the mines, and several had lost the right eye.”

It is said that their authority reposed on their character as an army of confessors and martyrs, no less than on that of an ecumenical council.

“In this respect no other council could approach them, and in the proceedings of the assembly the voice of an old confessor was received almost as an oracle.” Even the emperor himself regarded them with homage.

They came in groups over the Mediterranean, and along the Roman roads from the different parts of the vast empire, from Alexandria and far up the Nile in Egypt; from Syria, Euphrates, and the distant East; from Greece, and Cyprus and Rome; and from the west as far as Spain.

Of the characters present I will copy sketches of a very few:

“The aged Alexander, Bishop of Alexandria, was the only one present known by the title of pope. Papa was the special address given to the head of the Alexandrian church long before the name of Patriarch or Archbishop.”

“Close beside Pope Alexander is a small, insignificant young man of hardly twenty-five, of lively manners and speech, and of bright, serene countenance. Though he is but the deacon or archdeacon of Alexandria (at this time), he has closely riveted the attention of the assembly by the vehemence of his arguments. That small, insignificant young man is the great Athanasius,” the chief opposer of Arius, and defender of the Nicene creed.

“Next to these was an important presbyter of Alexandria, the parish priest of its principal church. In appearance he is the very opposite of Athanasius. He is sixty years of age, tall, thin, and apparently unable to support his stature. He would be handsome, but for the deadly pallor of his face and a downcast look caused by weakness of eyesight. At times his veins throb and swell, and his limbs tremble, as if suffering from some violent internal complaint. There is a wild look about him that is at times startling. His dress and demeanor are those of a rigid ascetic. He wears a long coat with short sleeves, and a scarf of half size, the mark of an austere life, and his hair hangs in a tangled mass over his head. He is usually silent, but at times breaks out into fierce excitement. Yet with all this there is a sweetness in his voice, and a winning, earnest, fascinating manner. This strange, captivating giant is the heretic Arius.” He is described as a man of peculiar loveliness and purity of character from his childhood, of great personal power and influence, and as exerting, at whatever cost of self-sacrifice, an uncompromising resistance to the popular worldly policy which he believed would degrade and enslave the church in its subordination to the temporal power.

Two notable characters, Potammon and Paphnutius, came from the interior of Egypt. They had lived a great part of their lives in the desert. Both had lost the right eye, and suffered otherwise in the persecution. Bishop Paul, from near the Euphrates, had had his hands paralyzed by the searing of the muscles with a red-hot iron.

There was Jacob of Nisibis, who had lived for years as a hermit, on the mountains, in forests and caves, browsing on roots and leaves, and clothed in a rough goat-hair cloak. This dress and manner of life he retained after he became a bishop.

From the distant east came John the Persian, Aristaces, son of Gregory the illuminator, and founder of the Armenian church, and Eusebius the Great, of Nicomedia, were of the number. Also Eusebius, bishop of Cesarea, the interpreter, chaplain and confessor of Constantine, and the father of ecclesiastical history. One of the most interesting characters, of whom many remarkable stories are told, was Spyridion, from the island of Cyprus, a shepherd both before and after his elevation to the episcopate. Hosius, Bishop of Cordova in Spain, was one of the most powerful and revered men in the council. He had been a confessor during the persecutions of Maximin. The council was opened by the emperor in person. It continued about twenty days.

A creed was first produced which all could sign—one which would doubtless now be pronounced full and orthodox by Christians generally. The part relating to the Son reads as follows: “I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Word of God, God of God, Light of Light, Life of Life, the only begotten Son, the first born of every creature, begotten of the Father before all worlds, by whom also all things were made,” etc.

But full as this was it did not touch the test point in controversy. That point turned upon two Greek words, signifying respectively, “of the same substance,” and “of like substance.” The Arians admitted that Christ in his divine nature was of like substance with the Father, but denied that he was of the same substance.

Athanasius and his party feared that this would lead, not to the denial of the divinity of Christ, but to the belief in two Gods instead of one. “Polytheism, Paganism, Hellenism was the enemy from which the church had just been delivered by Constantine, and this was the error under whose dominion it was feared the teaching of Arius might bring them back.” These scarred and maimed veterans of Christianity had suffered because of their steadfast testimony to the truth that there is one God; and here in the first great council of the entire church the creed was formulated which has stood through the centuries as a protest and guard against such distinction of persons in the Trinity as shall make a plurality of Gods. The Nicene creed as adopted had the additional clause inserted regarding the Son—of the substance of the Father.

Arius was condemned as a heretic and sentenced to banishment with some other leaders of his party, including Eusebius of Nicomedia. But afterward at the entreaty of the Princess Constantia, sister of the emperor, they were recalled. For 300 years after the date of its origin Arianism was a considerable power, both political and religious, not only in the East where it had its birth, but in western and Teutonic nations. “The Gothic population that descended on the Roman empire, so far as it was Christian at all, held to the faith of Arius. Our first Teutonic version of the Scriptures was by an Arian missionary, Ulfilas. The first conqueror of Rome, Alaric, the first conqueror of Africa, Genseric, were Arians. Theodoric the Great, King of Italy, was an Arian. The Gothic kingdoms of Spain and France were the stronghold of Arianism.”

But the orthodox doctrine established at Nice won its way and secured its place in the heart of Christendom, which, as Dean Stanley says, “with but few exceptions receives the confession of the first council, as the earliest, the most solemn, and the most universal expression of Christian theology.”