doctrine received recognition at the hands of so many bishops seems to prove that the Church had not yet formulated her belief in respect of this mystery with anything like precision; that theories similar to those advocated by Arius were rife throughout the East and were by no means repugnant to the general tendency of its thought. Arianism would naturally, and did actually, make a most potent appeal to minds of very varying quality and calibre. It appealed, for example, to those Christians who had not quite succeeded in throwing off the influences of the paganism around them, a class obviously large and comprising within it alike the educated who were under the spell of the religious philosophy of the Neo-Platonists, and the uneducated and illiterate who believed, or at any rate spoke as if they believed, in a multiplicity of gods. To minds, therefore, still insensibly thinking in terms of polytheism one can understand the attraction of the leading thought of Arianism, viz., one supreme, eternal, omnipotent God, God the Father, and a secondary God, God the Son, God and creature in one, and therefore the better fitted to be intermediary between the unapproachable God and fallen humanity. For how many long centuries had not the world believed in demi-gods as it had believed in gods? Arianism, on one side of its character, enabled men to cast a lingering look behind on an outworn creed which had not been wholly gross and which had not been too exacting for human frailty. Moreover, there were many texts in Holy Scripture which seemed in the most explicit language to corroborate the truth of Arius’s teaching. “My Father is greater than I,” so Christ had Himself said, and the obvious and literal meaning of the words seemed entirely inconsistent with any essential co-equality of Son and Father. The text, of course, is subject to another—if more recondite—interpretation, but the history of religion has shewn that the origin of most sects has been due to people fastening upon individual texts and founding upon them doctrines both great and small. Again,—and perhaps this was the strongest claim that Arianism could put forward,—it appealed to men’s pride and belief in the adequacy of their reason. Mankind has always hungered after a religious system based on reason, founded in reason; secure against all objectors, something four-square and solid against all possible assailants. Arianism claimed to provide such a system, and it unquestionably had the greater appearance—at any rate to a superficial view—of being based upon irrefutable argument. Canon Bright put the case very well where he wrote[89]: