This, to me, appears to bid very fair for orthodoxy; and was, I think, enough to have reconciled the bishop and his presbyter, if there had not been some other reasons of the animosity between them. But when other terms were invented, that were hard to be understood, and difficult to be explained, the original controversy ceased; and the dispute then was about the meaning of those terms, and the fitness of their use in explaining the divinity of the Son of God. Arius knew not how to reconcile the bishop’s words, “ever begotten,” with the assertion, that the Son, co-exists “unbegottenly with God;” and thought it little less than a contradiction to affirm, that he was “unbegottenly begotten.” And as to the word “consubstantial,” Arius seems to have thought that it destroyed the personal subsistence of the Son, and brought in the doctrine of Sabellius; or else that it implied that the Son was “a part of the Father;” and for this reason declined the use of it. And, indeed, it doth not appear to me that the council of Nice had themselves any determinate and fixed meaning to the word, as I think may be fairly inferred from the debates of that council with Eusebius, bishop of Cæsarea, about that term; which, though put into their creed, in opposition to the Arians, was yet explained by them in such a sense, as almost any Arian could have, bona fide, subscribed. On the other hand, the bishop of Alexandria seems to have thought, that when Arius asserted that the son existed “by the will and counsel of the Father;” it implied the mutability of his nature; and that, when he taught concerning the Son, “that there was a time when he was not,” it inferred his being a temporary, and not an eternal being; though Arius expressly denied both these consequences. In short, it was a controversy upon this metaphysical question, “[375]whether or no God could generate or produce a being, in strictness of speech, as eternal as himself? Or, whether God’s generating the Son doth not necessarily imply the pre-existence of the Father, either in conception, or some small imaginable point of time;” as Arius imagined, and the bishop denied. ----- Footnote 375: Theod. E. H. l. 18. c. 5. -----