Antioch, to Valens the Emperor. Valens, low-
born, cruel, and covetous, was an Arian, and could not lose the
opportunity of making converts. He sent theologians to meet Ulfilas, and
torment him into Arianism. When he arrived, Valens tormented him
himself. While the Goths starved he argued, apostasy was the absolute
condition of his help, till Ulfilas, in a weak moment, gave his word that
the Goths should become Arians, if Valens would give them lands on the
South bank of the Danube. Then they would be the Emperor's men, and
guard the marches against all foes. From that time Arianism became the
creed, not only of the Goths, but of the Vandals, the Sueves, and almost
all the Teutonic tribes.

It was (if the story be true) a sinful and foolish compact, forced from a
good man by the sight of his countrymen's extreme danger and misery. It
avenged itself, soon enough, upon both Goths and Romans.

To the Goths themselves the change must have seemed not only unimportant,
but imperceptible. Unaccustomed to that accuracy of thought, which is
too often sneered at by Gibbon as 'metaphysical subtlety,' all of which
they would have been aware was the change of a few letters in a creed
written in an unknown tongue. They could not know, (Ulfilas himself
could not have known, only two years after the death of St. Athanasius at
Alexandria; while the Nicaean Creed was as yet received by only half of
the Empire; and while he meanwhile had been toiling for years in the
Danubian wilds, ignorant perhaps of the controversy which had meanwhile
convulsed the Church)--neither the Goths nor he, I say, could have known
that the Arianism, which they embraced, was really the last, and as it
were apologetic, refuge of dying Polytheism; that it, and not the
Catholic Faith, denied the abysmal unity of the Godhead; that by making
the Son inferior to the Father, as touching his Godhead, it invented two
Gods, a greater and a lesser, thus denying the absoluteness, the
infinity, the illimitability, by any category of quantity, of that One
Eternal, of whom it is written, that God is a Spirit. Still less could
they have guessed that when Arius, the handsome popular preacher (whose
very name, perhaps, Ulfilas never heard) asked the fine ladies of
Alexandria--'Had you a son before that son was born?'--'No.' 'Then God
could have no son before that son was begotten, &c.'--that he was
mingling up the idea of Time with the idea of that Eternal God who
c