I submit that no matter what particular defined doctrine in the Catholic scheme you may select, you will find without exception this most notable character attaching to it, that when denial of it was made within the Christian community--as when Arius denied the consubstantiality of the Son, or as when Nestorius denied the divine motherhood of Our Lady--it had the effect of a stone thrown at a pane of glass and breaking it: the startling effect of a shock; of something quite unexpected and exceedingly and unpleasantly new. I myself who am writing this did, when I was a young man and very imperfectly instructed, take for granted the opposite. I thought, for instance, that the doctrine of the Trinity had very slowly arisen, that an original ignorance of Our Lord’s full divinity was gradually dispelled by the development of the doctrine; that the earlier the evidence was, the less it would confirm the doctrine; and that Arius was fighting a sort of rear-guard action: defending a cause which had once been vigorous but was lapsing through the process of time. I thought that; and I fancy most ordinary educated men who have not had the leisure or desire to read the evidence in detail think something of that sort with regard to the story of almost any one of the Christian mysteries. For, after all, the process is exactly what one would expect. One would expect any original statement in human affairs to be commonplace and straightforward, and the supernatural interpretation of it to come in by a process of accretion and illusion such as creates the innumerable legends and myths of mankind: first the teacher is a revered man, then vaguely thought to have something in him of the divine, then to be some sort of divine being, and, lastly, a God. It was when I came to read the evidence and look closely into the matter for myself that I began to feel the surprise which I record here and which any one of my readers will also feel if he will read the actual evidence instead of guessing at what sounds most probable. The evidence is clear that the Trinitarian doctrine, growing in definition, was never put forward with novel and protested accretions. It was the Arian challenge which was new and immediately resisted.