But they had at the same time to maintain the doctrines of the Trinity and the Divinity of Christ. They were to assert the Deity of Christ, whom the heretics held to be a creature, and yet ascribed to him the works of creation. It is at least natural to suppose that, to avoid giving the heretics any advantage in popular argument, and to use expressions importing the broadest contrast to theirs, they at first ascribed the creation to God, without any reference to the distinction of Persons in the Godhead; or, to maintain that doctrine at the same time, and to meet the point in question as to the Deity of the Creator, they ascribed the works of creation and providence to God the Father. Whatever may have been the process, this was the result. It is not unlikely that, at the date of the Apostles' and the Nicene Creeds, there were many who at length joined in adopting them, who from ignorance, or from the sway of heretical influences, were greatly confused upon these subjects; many, more or less perverted by Gnostic and Judaizing dogmas; many who saw no possibility of maintaining the doctrines which they held concerning the Father, as the Father of Christ the Son by _eternal generation_, and as the fountain of all authority and power, without specifically ascribing to him the works of creation and providence; many who, relying on the doctrine of the _eternal_ generation of the Son, as the most conclusive and unanswerable proof of his Divinity, confined their attention to that, and saw no possibility of meeting and counteracting the dogmas of Cerinthus, or of other heretics, if they ascribed the creation to the Son. It must be considered that the terms which they employed were adopted expressly to meet the growing and fatal errors which infested the Church; and that they had, at the date of the Nicene Creed, a most powerful motive to concession and accommodation for the sake of unity, in the notion already prevalent concerning schism--defection from the faith of the dominant or Catholic Church, or separation from that body on that account--as a mortal sin. It was pointedly to their purpose to maintain, in opposition to Cerinthus, that the Christ was the Son of God, and the only being designated by that title; and equally to their purpose, in opposition to Arius, to maintain that he was not created. They were to meet these points somehow, or accomplish nothing against the most formidable heresies. They hit upon a phraseology which, if it be not wholly unintelligible to mortals, was probably then deemed to be unanswerable, in the assertion that he was the Son by _eternal generation_; begotten, not made, &c. The language of the creeds, hereafter more particularly referred to, is presumed to have become gradually familiar to the opposers of heresy before it was embodied in those formularies. They express in a condensed form the sentiments and terms by which the leading controvertists repelled the dominant heresies of the time.