For these reasons they were cautious in theological speculation. Yet the facts and relationships introduced into the world of experience by the revelation of the Son represent eternal realities, if under great limitations yet still truly, and thus make possible a real security up to a certain point on what lies beyond the unassisted human knowledge. Thus, first, when the Arian movement passed from the denial of the true Godhead of Christ to a similar position with reference to the Holy Spirit, the Christian Church felt itself fully justified alike by its past traditions[288], and by its Scriptures, in emphasizing the personal distinctness and the true Godhead of the Holy Spirit. Unless all Christ's language was an illusion, the Holy Spirit was really personal and really distinct from Himself and the Father; nor could One who was associated with the Father and the Son in all the essentially Divine operations of nature and grace, be less than truly and really God, an essential element in the Eternal Being. The Arian controversy in its earlier stages had disposed of the notion that Christian theology could at any cost admit the conception of a created personality, clothed with Divine attributes and exercising Divine functions. Secondly, the consideration that the relations manifested in the Incarnation in terms of our experience between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, express transcendent and eternal relations, led the Church to speak of the Holy Ghost as proceeding from the Father, as the unique fount of Godhead, through the Son: or in somewhat less nicely discriminated language 'from the Father and the Son[289].' In the fifth century there is a tendency to use in the East the former, in the West the latter mode of expression, but without any essential difference. Nor can it be said that the causes which were at work later to divide the Eastern and the Western Churches on the subject of the procession of the Holy Ghost, were so much really theological as ecclesiastical and political.