_L._ I understand how it came to be a reproach, but not how it follows that every opinion condemned by a Church that is, or calls itself catholic, must needs be an error or a sin. The Church of England denies that consequence, and that such doctrine as they hold cannot be proved to be erroneous but by the Scripture, which cannot err; but the Church, being but men, may both err and sin. _P._ In this case we must consider also that error, in its own nature, is no sin. For it is impossible for a man to err on purpose; he cannot have an intention to err; and nothing is sin unless there be a sinful intention: much less are such errors sins, as neither hurt the commonwealth nor any private man, nor are against any law positive or natural; such errors as were those for which men were burnt, in the time when the Pope had the government of this Church. _L._ Since you have told me how heresy came to be a name, tell me also how it came to be a crime; and what were the heresies that first were made crimes. _P._ Since the Christian Church could declare, and none else, what doctrines were heresies, but had no power to make statutes for the punishment of heretics before they had a Christian King, it is manifest that heresy could not be made a crime before the first Christian Emperor, which was Constantine the Great. In his time, one Arius, a priest of Alexandria, in dispute with his bishop publicly denied the divinity of Christ, and maintained it afterwards in the pulpit, which was the cause of a sedition and much bloodshed both of citizens and soldiers in that city. For the preventing of the like for the time to come, the Emperor called a general Council of bishops to the city of Nice; who being met, he exhorted them to agree upon a confession of the Christian faith, promising that whatsoever they agreed on he would cause to be observed. _L._ By the way, the Emperor, I think, was here a little too indifferent. _P._ In this Council was established so much of the creed we now use and call the Nicene creed, as reacheth to the words, _I believe in the Holy Ghost_. The rest was established by the three general Councils next succeeding. By the words of which creed almost all the heresies then in being, and especially the doctrine of Arius, were condemned; so that now all doctrines published by writing or by word, and repugnant to this confession of the first four general Councils, and contained in the Nicene creed, were, by the imperial law forbidding them, made crimes; such as are that of Arius, denying the divinity of Christ; that of Eutiches, denying the two natures of Christ; that of the Nestorians, denying the divinity of the Holy Ghost; that of the Anthropomorphites, that of the Manichees, that of the Anabaptists, and many other. _L._ What punishment had Arius?