So the Council assembled in the June of 325 in the charming city of Nicæa, on the shores of the Ascanian lake. The intense interest which it aroused was not confined to those who were to take part in it, or even to the Christian population of the city and district. It spread, so we are expressly told, to those who still clung to the old religion. Debates on the nature of the Fatherhood of God and the Sonship of Christ would be almost as welcome and absorbing to a Neo-Platonist philosopher as to a Christian bishop. His pleasure in the intellectual exercise was marred by no anxiety lest it should result in disturbance of happy and settled belief. When Greek met Greek they began forthwith to argue, and so, without waiting for the Council formally to open, the early arrivals at Nicæa commenced their discussions with all comers on the question of the hour. The story of one of these informal encounters is told by most of the ecclesiastical writers. A certain pagan philosopher was holding forth with great fluency and making mock of the Christian mysteries, to the amusement of a number of bystanders. Finally, his challenge of contradiction was accepted by “a simple old man, one of the confessors of the persecution,” who knew nothing of dialectics. As he moved forward to answer the scoffer there was a burst of laughter from some of those present, while the Christians trembled lest their unskilled champion should be turned to ridicule by his practised opponent. Their anxiety, however, was soon set at rest. “In the name of Jesus Christ, O philosopher, listen!” Such was the old man’s exordium, and the burden of his few unstudied words was to restate his “artless, unquestioning belief”[94] in the cardinal truths of Christianity. There was no argument. “If you believe,” he said, “tell me so.” “I believe,” said the philosopher, compelled, as he afterwards explained it, to become a Christian by some marvellous power. Such is the version of Sozomen; according to Socrates the old man said, “Christ and the apostles committed to us no dialectical art and no vain deception, but plain, bare doctrine, which is guarded by faith and good works.”[95] When we consider the endless floods of dialectical subtlety which were poured out during and after the Council of Nicæa by those engaged in the Arian controversy, it seems rather biting irony that a pagan philosopher should have been thus easily and rapidly converted from darkness to light. ----- Footnote 94: ἀπεριέργως πιστείομεν. Footnote 95: γυμνὴν γνώμην, πίστει καὶ καλοῖς ἔργοις φυλαττομένην.—Socrates, i., 8. -----