Alexander summoned a provincial synod of a hundred Egyptian and Libyan bishops to pronounce judgment upon the doctrines and the person of Arius. Attended by his principal supporters, Arius appeared before the synod and boldly stood to his guns. He maintained, that is to say, that God had not always been Father; that the Word was the creature and handiwork of the Father; that the Son was not like the Father according to substance and was neither the true Word nor the true Wisdom, having been created by the Word and Wisdom which are in God; that by His nature He was subject to change like all other rational creatures; that the Son does not perfectly know either the Father or His own essence, and that Jesus Christ is not true God. The majority of the bishops listened with horror as Arius thus unfolded his daring and, in their ears, blasphemous creed. One of them at length put a searching test question. “If,” he asked, “the Word of God is subject to change, would it have been possible for the Word to change, as Satan had changed, from goodness to wickedness?” “Yes,” came the answer. Thereupon the synod promptly excommunicated Arius and his friends, including two bishops, Secundus of Ptolemais in the Pentapolis and Theonas of Marmorica, together with six priests and six deacons. The synod also anathematised his doctrines. The Arian heresy had formally begun. Arius quitted Alexandria and betook himself to Palestine, where he and his companions received hospitable treatment at the hands of some of the bishops, notably Eusebius of Cæsarea and Paulinus of Tyre. He bore himself very modestly, assuming the rôle not of a rebel against authority, but of one who had been deeply wronged, because he had been grievously misunderstood. He was no longer the turbulent priest, strong in the knowledge of his intellectual superiority over his bishop, but a minister of the Church who had been cast out from among the faithful and whose one absorbing desire was to be restored to communion. He did not ask his kindly hosts to associate themselves with him. He merely begged that they should use their good offices with Alexander to effect a reconciliation, and that they should not refuse to treat him as a true member of the Church. A few, like Macarius of Jerusalem, rejected his overtures, but a large number of bishops in the Province—if we may so term it—of the Patriarch Antioch acceded to his wishes. No doubt Arius presented his case, when he was suing for recognition and favour, in a very different form from that in which he had presented it from the rostrum of his church at Baucalis. He was as subtle in his knowledge of the ways of the world as in his knowledge of the processes of logic. Nevertheless, he cannot possibly have disguised the main doctrine which he had preached for years—the doctrine, that is to say, that the Son was inferior to the Father and had been created by the Father out of a substance other than His own—and the fact that the champion of such a