offer them the compliment of a morning salutation. To say “Good-morning” to an Arian was to hold communication with the lost. Such a manifesto merely added fuel to the fire, and the two parties drew farther and farther apart. Nor was Arius idle. It must have been about this time that he composed the notorious poem, _Thalia_, in which he embodied his doctrines. He selected the metre of a pagan poet, Sotades of Crete, of whom we know nothing save that his verses had the reputation of being exceedingly licentious. Arius did this of deliberate purpose. His object was to popularise his doctrines. Sotades had a vogue; Arius desired one. What he did was precisely similar to what in our own time the Salvation Army has done in setting its hymns to the popular tunes and music-hall ditties of the day. This was at first a cause of scandal to many worthy people, who now admit the cleverness and admire the shrewdness of the idea. Similarly, Arius got people to sing his doctrines to the very tunes to which they had previously sung the indecencies of Sotades. He wrote ballads, so we are told by Philostorgius—the one Arian historian who has survived—for sailors, millers, and travellers. But it is certainly difficult to understand their popularity, judging from the isolated fragments which are quoted by Athanasius in his _First Discourse Against the Arians_ (chap. xi.). According to Athanasius, the _Thalia_ opened as follows: “According to faith of God’s elect, God’s prudent ones, Holy children, rightly dividing, God’s Holy Spirit receiving, Have I learned this from the partakers of wisdom, Accomplished, divinely taught, and wise in all things. Along their track have I been walking, with like opinions. I am very famous, the much suffering for God’s glory, And taught of God, I have acquired wisdom and knowledge.” It is rather the unspeakable tediousness and frigidity of this exordium than its arrogant impiety that strike the modern reader. Athanasius then proceeds to quote examples of Arius’s “repulsive and most impious mockeries.” For example, “God was not always a Father; there was once a time when God was alone and was not yet a Father. But afterwards He became a Father.” Or, “the Son was not always,” or “the Word is not very God, but by participation in Grace, He, as all others, is God only in name.” If these are good specimens of what Athanasius calls “the fables to be found in Arius’s jocose composition,” the standard of the jocose or the ridiculous must have altered greatly. Why such a poem should have been called the _Thalia_ or “Merrymaking,” it is hard to conceive. Yet, one can understand how the ribald wits of Alexandria gladly seized upon this portentous controversy and twisted its prominent phrases into the catch-words of the day. There is a passage in Gregory of Nyssa bearing on this subject which has frequently been quoted.