unity of God, just as on the other hand, many had indulged in exaggerated statements about the divinity of Christ. It seemed therefore desirable to set aside altogether the question of the personal distinction of the Son and Spirit from the Father. This happened either in the way clearly favoured by the Ebionites who regarded Christ as a mere man, who, like the prophets, though in a much higher measure, had been endued with divine wisdom and power (_dynamic_ =Monarchianism=), or in a way more accordant with the Christian mode of thought, admitting that the fulness of the Godhead dwelt in Christ, and either identifying the Logos with the Father (_Patripassianism_), or seeing in Him only a mode of the activity of the Father (_modal Monarchianism_). Monarchianism in all these forms was pronounced heretical by all the most illustrious fathers of the 3rd cent., and hypostasianism was declared orthodox. But even under hypostasianism an element of error crept in at a later period in the form of subordinationism, and modal Monarchianism approached nearer to the church doctrine by adopting the doctrine of sameness of essence (ὁμοουσία) in Son and Father. The orthodox combination of the two opposites was reached in the 3rd cent, in _homoousian hypostasianism_, but only in the 4th cent. attained universal acceptance (§ 50). § 33.2. =The Alogians.=--Soon after A.D. 170 in Asia Minor we meet with the Alogians as the first decided opponents from within the church of Logos doctrine laid down in the Gospel by John and the writings of the Apologists. They started in diametrical opposition to the chiliasm of the Montanists and their claims to prophetic gifts, and were thus led not only to repudiate the Apocalypse but also the Gospel of John; the former on account of its chiliast-prophetic contents which embraced so much that was unintelligible, yea absurd and untrue; the latter, first of all on account of the use the Montanists made of its doctrine of the Paraclete in support of their prophetic claims (§ 40, 1), but also on account of its seeming contradictions of and departures from the narratives of the Synoptists, and finally, on account of its Logos doctrine in which the immediate transition from the incarnation of the Logos to the active life of Christ probably seemed to them too closely resembling docetic Gnosticism. They therefore attributed to the Gnosticizing Judaist, Cerinthus, the authorship both of the Fourth Gospel and of the Apocalypse. Of their own Christological theories we have no exact information. Irenæus and Hippolytus deal mildly with them and recognise them as members of the Catholic church. It is Epiphanius who first gives them the equivocal designation of Alogians (which may either be “deniers of the Logos” or “the irrational”), denouncing them as heretical rejecters of the Logos doctrine and the Logos-Gospel.