lenting fury.

The provinces of Egypt and Asia, which cultivated the language and
manners of the Greeks, had deeply imbibed the venom of the Arian
controversy. The familiar study of the Platonic system, a vain and
argumentative disposition, a copious and flexible idiom, supplied the
clergy and people of the East with an inexhaustible flow of words and
distinctions; and, in the midst of their fierce contentions, they easily
forgot the doubt which is recommended by philosophy, and the submission
which is enjoined by religion. The inhabitants of the West were of a
less inquisitive spirit; their passions were not so forcibly moved by
invisible objects, their minds were less frequently exercised by the
habits of dispute; and such was the happy ignorance of the Gallican
church, that Hilary himself, above thirty years after the first general
council, was still a stranger to the Nicene creed. The Latins had
received the rays of divine knowledge through the dark and doubtful
medium of a translation. The poverty and stubbornness of their native
tongue was not always capable of affording just equivalents for the
Greek terms, for the technical words of the Platonic philosophy, which
had been consecrated, by the gospel or by the church, to express the
mysteries of the Christian faith; and a verbal defect might introduce
into the Latin theology a long train of error or perplexity. But as the
western provincials had the good fortune of deriving their religion from
an orthodox source, they preserved with steadiness the doctrine
which they had accepted with docility; and when the Arian pestilence
approached their frontiers, they were supplied with the seasonable
preservative of the Homoousion, by the paternal care of the Roman
pontiff. Their sentiments and their temper were displayed in the
memorable synod of Rimini, which surpassed in numbers the council of
Nice, since it was composed of above four hundred bishops of Italy,
Africa, Spain, Gaul, Britain, and Illyricum. From the first debates it
appeared, that only fourscore prelates adhered to the party, though
they affected to anathematize the name and memory, of Arius. But this
inferiority was compensated by the advantages of skill, of experience,
and of discipline; and the minority was conducted by Valens and
Ursacius, two bishops of Illyricum, who had spent their lives in the
intrigues of courts and councils, and who had been trained under the
Eusebian banner in the religious wars o