The first and most troublesome heresies of the primitive church, were about the Trinity. For, according to the usual curiosity of natural philosophers, they could not abstain from disputing the very first principles of Christianity, into which they were baptized, _in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost_. Some there were that made them allegorical. Others would make one creator of good, and another of evil; which was in effect to set up two Gods, one contrary to another; supposing that causation of evil could not be attributed to God, without impiety. From which doctrine they are not far distant, that now make the first cause of sinful actions to be every man as to his own sin. Others there were, that would have God to be a body with parts organical, as face, hands, fore-parts, and back-parts. Others, that Christ had no real body, but was a mere phantasm: for phantasms were taken then, and have been ever since, by unlearned and superstitious men, for things real and subsistent. Others denied the divinity of Christ. Others, that Christ, being God and man, was two persons. Others confessed he was one person, and withal that he had but one nature. And a great many other heresies arose from the too much adherence to the philosophy of those times: whereof some were suppressed for a time by St. John’s publishing his Gospel, and some by their own unreasonableness vanished, and some lasted till the time of Constantine the Great, and after. When Constantine the Great, made so by the assistance and valour of the Christian soldiers, had attained to be the only Roman Emperor, he also himself became a Christian, and caused the temples of the heathen gods to be demolished, and authorised Christian religion only to be public. But towards the latter end of his time, there arose a dispute in the city of Alexandria, between Alexander the Bishop, and Arius, a presbyter of the same city; wherein Arius maintained, first, that Christ was inferior to his Father; and afterwards, that he was no God, alleging the words of Christ, _my Father is greater than I_: the bishop, on the contrary, alleging the words of St. John, _and the word was God_; and the words of St. Thomas, _my Lord and my God_. This controversy presently, amongst the inhabitants and soldiers of Alexandria, became a quarrel, and was the cause of much bloodshed in and about the city; and was likely then to spread further, as afterwards it did. This so far concerned the Emperor’s civil government, that he thought it necessary to call a general council of all the bishops and other eminent divines throughout the Roman Empire, to meet at the city of Nice. When they were assembled, they presented the Emperor with libels of accusation one against another. When he had received these libels into his hands, he made an oration to the fathers assembled, exhorting them to agree, and to fall in hand with the settlement of the articles of faith, for which cause he had assembled them;