For with the growth of the Church, Christianity had become encumbered with doctrines that hardened into dogmas, and by this time a controversy was raging over the rival dogmas upheld by two officers of the Church in Egypt, Athanasius and Arius. Both held that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, but Arius maintained that He had proceeded from the Father and was therefore second to the latter, while Athanasius proclaimed the absolute equality of the Father and the Son. The Council of Nicæa pronounced the latter doctrine to be orthodox and branded the Arian as heresy. The Nicene Creed, in which the orthodox was embodied, was accepted in the West, but in the East, the Arian dogma continued to be held. Apart, however, from its bearing on this question, the Council of Nicæa was an event of profound importance. This first Œcumenical Council, or Council representative of the whole Christian world, not only was an object lesson of the widespread power of the Church, but also exalted the clergy to a high position of spiritual authority amid the temporal distractions of the time. Constantine, upon his deathbed, accepted the Christian faith. Some fifty years later Theodosius made Christianity the sole religion of the state and the pagan temples were closed. By degrees the spiritual power of the Church was reinforced by the temporal. The beginning of this change is sometimes dated from the act of the Frankish king, Pepin, to whom the Pope appealed to stem the attack of the Lombards, then pushing south from their possessions in Northern Italy and threatening Rome. Pepin drove them back and handed over a considerable slice of territory to the Pope, to swell the so-called “Patrimony of St. Peter.” The latter, from this time on, became a source of increasing wealth, which enabled the Popes to maintain armies and play the part of princes in the world of politics. Meanwhile, the temporal power of the Western Church, centred in the Papacy, had been helped by Constantine’s removal of the capital of the Empire to Constantinople. Two circumstances contributed to the change. By this time the Senate had lost even the semblance of authority, and the real source of government was in the consent of the armies. Secondly, the frontiers chiefly threatened were the eastern ones. Constantine accordingly selected as the site of a Nova Roma, the ancient Greek city of Byzantium. It, too, had its seven hills, occupying a promontory between the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmora, a spot defended, as well as beautified, by nature and already an important gateway of commerce, both by sea and land, between Europe and the East. Constantine planned the new city of Constantinople on extensive lines and set an example of magnificent building that was continued by his successors; so that Constantinople continued for a thousand years to be the Eastern bulwark of European civilisation, until it was conquered by the Moslems in 1453.