But neither pain nor pleasure ever interfered with the grand game of empire; and before midnight orders had been framed and issued by which the veteran legions of Hispania, Gaul, and Germany were to be gradually replaced by more recent levies; by which the brave and hardy Goths were put upon the most rigid military discipline; and by which all the chosen troops, upon whose skill and valor the unconquerable leader would be willing to stake the sovereignty of the world, were slowly concentrated to the eastward of Milan by a quiet, steady, unostentatious military movement that consumed months in its accomplishment and scarcely excited the suspicions of even the vigilant and intelligent agents of the Emperor Licinius. CHAPTER V. A BORN ECCLESIASTIC. In the year A.D. 319, Alexander, the old and pious Bishop of Alexandria, having become imbued with that Trinitarianism which began to assume a sort of doctrinal prominence in the Western Church even from the time when Constantine had defeated Maxentius and had so become Emperor of Rome, publicly proclaimed this dogma wherever he went. During that year, upon one of his episcopal visits, he preached in the Baucalis church a sermon which gave great offense to Arius the Libyan, who was presbyter thereof, and to many of the vast and opulent congregation. Upon the following Sabbath the presbyter had delivered an elaborate discourse, in the course of which he inveighed with great force and earnestness against some "expounders of new doctrines who had grown too learned in the philosophy of the world, and too much in love with the political and legal religion which had been established in place of Christianity in the Western Empire to remain satisfied with the simple, unquestionable statement of the Gospels that Jesus Christ was the Son of God; and had gone about to trouble the faith and harass the consciences of believers by novel and dangerous speculations concerning the nature of Deity that were not taught in the Scriptures and were unknown to three centuries of Christian faith and practice." And, although Arius mentioned not the venerable bishop by name, no one doubted for whom his fierce rebuke was intended, and understood perfectly well what doctrinal deliverances he condemned as "the philosophy of the world," as "the political and legal religion which had been established in the Western Empire," and as "not taught in the Scriptures," and as "unknown to three centuries of Christian faith and practice." To this sermon the bishop subsequently replied in language of even greater vehemence; and before very long there was a continuous controversy going on between them, in which numerous Christians engaged on both sides, until it spread throughout the churches and grew into heated and sometimes acrimonious disputations. Nearly all the Romans in Alexandria took part with the bishop, and urged him earnestly in the prosecution of the controversy,