its subtraction from the humanity of Christ. This solution, it will be observed, postulates the same psychology as the other, and whichever view prevailed the Church would be irrevocably committed to the current psychology by this definition of its doctrine. Both solutions offered perfectly logical deductions from the postulates assumed and it only wanted the advocates of one or the other to over-state the case so as to transgress against the teachings of philosophy or of traditional religion. The first false move came from Antioch. Laying great stress on the completeness of the humanity of Christ so that body, soul, and spirit were necessarily connected in the human frame, the view was so expressed as to describe the Virgin Mary as the mother of the human Christ, body, soul, and spirit alone, which implied, or seemed to imply, that at birth Christ was man only and afterwards became God by the Logos entering into the human body, a conclusion possibly not intended by those who expressed their views but pressed by their opponents. This had been the teaching of Diodorus and of Theodore of Mopseustia both associated with the school of Antioch, and defended in its extremer form by Nestorius, a monk of Antioch, who was made bishop of Constantinople in A.D. 428. Violent controversies ensued which resulted in a general council at Ephesus in 431, where the Alexandrian party succeeded in getting Nestorius and his followers condemned as heretics. Two years later the Nestorians, absolutely confident that their opponents were utterly illogical in supposing that the rational soul and the Logos in Christ were fused or united together, repudiated the official church and organised themselves as the Church which had no part with the heretics of Ephesus. The state Church, however, had the weight of the temporal authority behind it, and the heavy hand of persecution fell severely upon the Nestorians. In Antioch and Greek speaking Syria persecution did its work effectually and the Nestorians were reduced to the position of a fugitive sect, in Egypt, as might be expected, they had no footing, and the westerns as usual agreed with the dominant state church: only amongst the Syriac speaking Christians the Nestorian teaching had a free course, and that section for the most part adhered to it. Some time before this the school at Nisibis had been closed, or rather removed to Edessa. In A.D. 363 the city of Nisibis had been handed over to the Persians as one of the conditions of the peace which closed the unfortunate war commenced by Julian, and the members of the school, retiring into Christian territory, had re-assembled at Edessa, where a school was opened in 373, and thus Edessa in a Syriac speaking district but within the Byzantine Empire, became the centre of the vernacular speaking Syriac church.