The children, when they grew up, inherited their scruples, and so the sacrament was indefinitely deferred. It is not impossible that such feelings may have influenced Chrysostom’s mother and himself; but considering the natural and healthy character of his piety, which seems to have grown by a gentle and unintermitting progress from his childhood, they do not seem very probable in his case. A more cogent cause for the delay may perhaps be found in the distracted state of the Church in Antioch, which lasted, with increasing complications, from A.D. 330, or fifteen years prior to Chrysostom’s birth, up to the time of his baptism by Meletius, when a brighter day was beginning to dawn. The vicissitudes of the Church in Antioch during that period form a curious, though far from pleasing, picture of the inextricable difficulties, the deplorable schisms, into which the Church at large was plunged by the Arian controversy. Two years after the Council of Nice, A.D. 327, the Arians, through the assistance of Constantia, the Emperor’s sister, won the favour of Constantine. He lost no time during this season of prosperity in procuring the deposition of Catholic bishops. Eminent among these was Eustathius, Bishop of Antioch. He was ejected by a synod held in his own city on false charges of Sabellianism and adultery.[24] An Arian Bishop, Euphronius, was appointed, but the Catholic congregation indignantly withdrew to hold their services in another quarter of the town, on the opposite side of the Orontes.[25] The see remained for some time entirely in the hands of the Arians. When the Council of Sardica met in A.D. 342, and the Arian faction seceded from it to hold a Council of their own in Philippopolis, Stephen, Bishop of Antioch, was their president. He was deposed in A.D. 349 by the Emperor Constantius, having been detected as an accomplice in an infamous plot against some envoys from the Western Church.[26] But “uno avulso non deficit alter;” he was succeeded by another Arian, the eunuch Leontius.[27] He tried to conciliate the Catholics by an artful and equivocating policy, of which his manner of chanting the doxology was an instance. The Arian form of it was “Glory be to the Father BY the Son _in_ the Holy Ghost;” this the bishop was accustomed to slur in such an indistinct voice that the prepositions could not be clearly if at all heard, while he joined loudly in the second part of the hymn where all were agreed.[28] He died towards the close of A.D. 357, when the see was fraudulently seized by Eudoxius, Bishop of Germanicia. He favoured the extreme Arians so openly that the Semi-Arians appealed to the Emperor Constantius to summon a General Council. Their request was granted; but the Arians, fearing that the Catholics and Semi-Arians would coalesce to overwhelm them, artfully suggested that Rimini, the place proposed for the Council, was too distant for the Eastern prelates, and that