d thus has not
religion often been cold and dry and polemical, when it should have been
warm, fervent, and simple? Such seem to have been some of the effects of
the Trinitarian controversy between Athanasius and Arius, and their
respective followers even to our own times. A belief in the unity of
God, as distinguished from polytheism, has been made no more imperative
than a belief in the supposed relations between the Father and the Son.
The real mission of Christ, to save souls, with all the glorious peace
which salvation procures, has often been lost sight of in the covenant
supposed to have been made between the Father and the Son. Nothing could
exceed the acrimony of the Nicene Fathers in their opposition to those
who could not accept their deductions. And the more subtile the
distinctions the more violent were the disputes; until at last religious
persecution marked the conduct of Christians towards each other,--as
fierce almost as the persecutions they had suffered from the Pagans. And
so furious was the strife between those theological disputants,
estimable in other respects as were their characters, that even the
Emperor Constantine at last lost all patience and banished Athanasius
himself to a Gaulish city, after he had promoted him to the great See of
Alexandria as a reward for his services to the Church at the Council of
Nice. To Constantine the great episcopal theologian was simply
"turbulent," "haughty," "intractable."

With the establishment of the doctrine of the Trinity by the Council of
Nice, the interest in the reign of Constantine ceases, although he lived
twelve years after it. His great work as a Christian emperor was to
unite the Church with the State. He did not elevate the Church above the
State; that was the work of the Mediaeval Popes. But he gave external
dignity to the clergy, of whom he was as great a patron as Charlemagne.
He himself was a sort of imperial Pope, attending to things spiritual as
well as to things temporal. His generosity to the Church made him an
object of universal admiration to prelates and abbots and ecclesiastical
writers. In this munificent patronage he doubtless secularized the
Church, and gave to the clergy privileges they afterwards abused,
especially in the ecclesiastical courts. But when the condition of the
Teutonic races in barbaric times is considered, his policy may have
proved beneficent. Most historians consider that the elevation of the
clergy to an equality