tions and personal feuds; they had to conduct their
disputations amidst the struggles of would-be emperors; court eunuchs
and favourites swayed their counsels, and popular rioting clinched their
decisions. There was less freedom of discussion then in the Christian
world than there is at present (1916) in Belgium, and the whole audience
of educated opinion by which a theory could be judged did not equal,
either in numbers or accuracy of information, the present population of
Constantinople. To these conditions we owe the claim that the Christian
God is a magic god, very great medicine in battle, "in hoc signo
vinces," and the argument so natural to the minds of those days and so
absurd to ours, that since he had ALL power, all knowledge, and existed
for ever and ever, it was no use whatever to set up any other god
against him. . . .

By the fifth century Christianity had adopted as its fundamental belief,
without which everyone was to be "damned everlastingly," a conception
of God and of Christ's relation to God, of which even by the Christian
account of his teaching, Jesus was either totally unaware or so
negligent and careless of the future comfort of his disciples as
scarcely to make mention. The doctrine of the Trinity, so far as the
relationship of the Third Person goes, hangs almost entirely upon one
ambiguous and disputed utterance in St. John's gospel (XV. 26). Most of
the teachings of Christian orthodoxy resolve themselves to the attentive
student into assertions of the nature of contradiction and repartee.
Someone floats an opinion in some matter that has been hitherto vague,
in regard, for example, to the sonship of Christ or to the method of
his birth. The new opinion arouses the hostility and alarm of minds
unaccustomed to so definite a statement, and in the zeal of their recoil
they fly to a contrary proposition. The Christians would neither admit
that they worshipped more gods than one because of the Greeks, nor
deny the divinity of Christ because of the Jews. They dreaded to be
polytheistic; equally did they dread the least apparent detraction from
the power and importance of their Saviour. They were forced into the
theory of the Trinity by the necessity of those contrary assertions,
and they had to make it a mystery protected by curses to save it from a
reductio ad absurdam. The entire history of the growth of the Christian
doctrine in those disordered early centuries is a history of theology
by committe