In the West, it will be observed, spontaneous heresy had run to questions of action and ethics, partly following a Roman tradition of concern for conduct, partly expressing barbarian common-sense. To such thought, Christianity was alien, and it was cried down by voluble theologians like Augustine, backed, doubtless, not only by the average obedient priest, but by some who saw that the principles of Pelagius, logically carried out, made an end on the one hand of the whole Christian scheme, and on the other of the conception of an omnipotent God. Such reasoners must equally have seen that the Augustinian dogmas of predestination and grace made an end of human responsibility; and this was urged by some Pelagians, but with no effect. The irrational dogma best consisted with the functions and finance of the church, and it was ecclesiastically established accordingly. In the East, though there also Pelagius found followers, spontaneous heresy, as we have seen, was usually a matter of abstract dogma, as in the schisms of Praxeas, Sabellius, Paul of Samosata, Arius, and the Gnostics. What critical thought there was continued to follow the lead given to it by the older Greek dialectics. Aërius, who raised in Asia Minor in the fourth century an agitation against episcopacy, fasts, prayers for the dead, and the ceremony of slaying a lamb at Easter, is an exception among eastern heretics; and the dogmatic-dialectic tendency persisted. In the fifth century, Theodorus of Mopsuestia, a voluminous writer, taught rationally that most of the Old Testament prophecies applied by orthodoxy to Jesus had reference to events in pre-Christian history. Needless to say, this was heresy. But the chief new schisms of the period were those of Nestorius and the Monophysites. Nestorius, Bishop of Constantinople, a pupil of Theodorus, but a zealous persecutor of heresy, became embroiled in the second stage of the endless wrangle as to the nature of Christ. In the latter half of the fourth century, Apollinaris, Bishop of Laodicea, a strong anti-Arian, holding that the dogma of a God-Man was monstrous, had taught that Jesus was without a human soul (or mind, as distinguished from mere animal life), having only a divine one. This was to "confound the two natures"; Apollinaris was condemned; and the Syrian orthodox rectified matters by insisting that there were two, while the Egyptians, recoiling from the risk of a theory of two Christs, insisted that the two were nevertheless one.