The council continued in session until the 25th of August,――sixty-seven days. The principal, the almost exclusive attention of the council was directed to the new doctrine of Arius,――that Christ, the Son, was not equal to the Father, but was created by him, and was subordinate to him. The decision of the council, called the Nicene Creed, rebuked, in the most emphatic terms, the Arian doctrine as heresy. Its language upon this point was as follows:―― “We believe in one only God, Father all-powerful, Creator of all things visible and invisible; and in one only Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son, engendered of the Father (that is to say, of the substance of the Father), God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten and not made, consubstantial with the Father, through whom every thing has been made in heaven and on earth; who for us men, and for our salvation, has descended from the skies, has become incarnate and made man, has suffered, rose on the third day, ascended to the skies, and will come to judge the living and the dead.” Thus words were heaped upon words, to express, beyond all possibility of doubt, the sense of the council of the entire equality of the Son with the Father. The Arians seemed disposed to accept the same language used by the Trinitarians, while they affixed a different signification to the words. “The bishops,” writes the Abbé Fleury, “seeing the dissimulation of the Arians, and their bad faith, were constrained, that they might express their meaning more unequivocally, to include in a single word the sense of the Scriptures, and to say that the Son is _consubstantial_ with the Father, making use of the Greek word _homoousios_, which this dispute has since rendered so celebrated. They thus declared that the Son was not only _like_ the Father, but the _same_,――_identical with him_.” All the bishops but two signed this creed. After some conference, those two signed also. “It is said,” writes Eusebius,――“and it is Philistorge, an Arian author, who says it,――that these two, Eusebius of Nicomedia, and Theognis of Nice, used fraud in their subscriptions, which they made together. They inserted the letter _i_ in the word _homoousios_, so that it read _homoiousios_; which signifies _similar to_, not _identically the same_.”