The case of Antioch was not exceptional. Arians and Nicenes were still parties inside the church rather than distant sects. They still used the same prayers and the same hymns, still worshipped in the same buildings, still commemorated the same saints and martyrs, and still considered themselves members of the same church. The example of separation set by the Eustathians at Antioch and the Arians at Alexandria was not followed till a later stage of the controversy, when Diodorus and Flavian on one side, and the Anomoeans on the other, began to introduce their own peculiarities into the service. And if the bitterness of intestine strife was increased by a state of things which made every bishop a party nominee, there was some compensation in the free intercourse of parties afterwards separated by barriers of persecution. Nicenes and Arians in most places mingled freely long after Leontius was dead, and the Novatians of Constantinople threw open their churches to the victims of Macedonius in a way which drew his persecution on themselves, and was remembered in their favour even in the next century by liberal men like the historian Socrates. CHAPTER V. _THE VICTORY OF ARIANISM_. [Sidenote: The West (337-350).] Meanwhile new troubles were gathering in the West. While the Eastern churches were distracted with the crimes or wrongs of Marcellus and Athanasius, Europe remained at peace from the Atlantic to the frontier of Thrace. The western frontier of Constantius was also the western limit of the storm. Hitherto its distant echoes had been very faintly heard in Gaul and Spain; but now the time was come for Arianism to invade the tranquil obscurity of the West. [Sidenote: Magnentian war, 350-353.]