Beacon Lights of History, Volume 04: Imperial AntiquityLord, John
History
Beacon Lights of History, Volume 04: Imperial Antiquity
Lord, John
History
to the intellect; but the one can be so aided by learning that the truth
can be reached, while the other pushes the inquirer into an unfathomable
sea of difficulties. All moral truths are so bounded and involved with
other moral truths that they seem to qualify the meaning of each other.
Almost any assumed truth in religion, when pushed to its utmost logical
sequence, appears to involve absurdities. The "divine justice" of
theologians ends, by severe logical sequences, in apparent injustice,
and "divine mercy" in the sweeping away of all retribution.
It may not unreasonably be asked, Has not theology attempted too much?
Has it solved the truths for the solution of which it borrowed the aid
of reason, and has it not often made a religion which is based on
deductions and metaphysical distinctions as imperative as a religion
based on simple declarations? Has it not appealed to the head, when it
should have appealed to the heart and conscience; and thus has not
religion often been cold and dry and polemical, when it should have been
warm, fervent, and simple? Such seem to have been some of the effects of
the Trinitarian controversy between Athanasius and Arius, and their
respective followers even to our own times. A belief in the unity of
God, as distinguished from polytheism, has been made no more imperative
than a belief in the supposed relations between the Father and the Son.
The real mission of Christ, to save souls, with all the glorious peace
which salvation procures, has often been lost sight of in the covenant
supposed to have been made between the Father and the Son. Nothing could
exceed the acrimony of the Nicene Fathers in their opposition to those
who could not accept their deductions. And the more subtile the
distinctions the more violent were the disputes; until at last religious
persecution marked the conduct of Christians towards each other,--as
fierce almost as the persecutions they had suffered from the Pagans. And
so furious was the strife between those theological disputants,
estimable in other respects as were their characters, that even the
Emperor Constantine at last lost all patience and banished Athanasius
himself to a Gaulish city, after he had promoted him to the great See of
Alexandria as a reward for his services to the Church at the Council of
Nice. To Constantine the great episcopal theologian was simply
"turbulent," "haughty," "intractable."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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