e
occasion of a popular tumult. The Homoousians were fortified by the
reconciliation of fifty-nine Macelonian, or Semi-Arian, bishops; but
their secret reluctance to embrace the divinity of the Holy Ghost,
clouded the splendor of the triumph; and the declaration of Valens, who,
in the first years of his reign, had imitated the impartial conduct of
his brother, was an important victory on the side of Arianism. The two
brothers had passed their private life in the condition of catechumens;
but the piety of Valens prompted him to solicit the sacrament of
baptism, before he exposed his person to the dangers of a Gothic war.
He naturally addressed himself to Eudoxus, [66] [66a] bishop of the
Imperial city; and if the ignorant monarch was instructed by that Arian
pastor in the principles of heterodox theology, his misfortune, rather
than his guilt, was the inevitable consequence of his erroneous choice.
Whatever had been the determination of the emperor, he must have
offended a numerous party of his Christian subjects; as the leaders both
of the Homoousians and of the Arians believed, that, if they were not
suffered to reign, they were most cruelly injured and oppressed. After
he had taken this decisive step, it was extremely difficult for him to
preserve either the virtue, or the reputation of impartiality. He never
aspired, like Constantius, to the fame of a profound theologian; but
as he had received with simplicity and respect the tenets of Euxodus,
Valens resigned his conscience to the direction of his ecclesiastical
guides, and promoted, by the influence of his authority, the reunion of
the Athanasian heretics to the body of the Catholic church. At first, he
pitied their blindness; by degrees he was provoked at their obstinacy;
and he insensibly hated those sectaries to whom he was an object of
hatred. [67] The feeble mind of Valens was always swayed by the persons
with whom he familiarly conversed; and the exile or imprisonment of a
private citizen are the favors the most readily granted in a despotic
court. Such punishments were frequently inflicted on the leaders of
the Homoousian party; and the misfortune of fourscore ecclesiastics of
Constantinople, who, perhaps accidentally, were burned on shipboard,
was imputed to the cruel and premeditated malice of the emperor, and his
Arian ministers. In every contest, the Catholics (if we may anticipate
that name) were obliged to pay the penalty of their own faults, and of
tho