: Council of Milan (Oct. 355).]

There was a sort of armed truce for the next two years. Liberius of Rome
disowned the weakness of his legates and besought the Emperor to hold a
new council. But Constantius was busy with the barbarians, and had to
leave the matter till he came to Milan in the autumn of 355. There
Julian was invested with the purple and sent as Caesar to drive the
Alemanni out of Gaul, or, as some hoped, to perish in the effort. The
council, however, was for a long time quite unmanageable, and only
yielded at last to open violence. Dionysius of Milan, Eusebius of
Vercellae, and Lucifer of Calaris in Sardinia were the only bishops who
had to be exiled.

[Sidenote: Lucifer of Calaris.]

The appearance of Lucifer is enough to show that the contest had entered
on a new stage. The lawless tyranny of Constantius had roused an
aggressive fanaticism which went far beyond the claim of independence
for the church. In dauntless courage and determined orthodoxy Lucifer
may rival Athanasius himself, but any cause would have been disgraced by
his narrow partisanship and outrageous violence. Not a bad name in
Scripture but is turned to use. Indignation every now and then supplies
the place of eloquence, but more often common sense itself is almost
lost in the weary flow of vulgar scolding and interminable abuse. He
scarcely condescends to reason, scarcely even to state his own belief,
but revels in the more congenial occupation of denouncing the fires of
damnation against the disobedient Emperor.

[Sidenote: Hilary of Poitiers.]

The victory was not to be won by an arm of flesh like this. Arianism had
an enemy more dangerous than Lucifer. From the sunny land of Aquitaine,
the firmest conquest of Roman civilization in Atlantic Europe, came
Hilary of Poitiers, the noblest representative of Western literature in
the Nicene age. Hilary was by birth a heathen, and only turned in ripe
manhood from philosophy to Scripture, coming before us in 355 as an old
convert and a bishop of some standing. He was by far the deepest thinker
of the West, and a match for Athanasius himself in depth of earnestness
and massive strength of intellect. But Hilary was a student rather than
an orator, a thinker rather than a statesman like Athanasius. He had not
touched the controversy till it was forced upon him, and would much have
preferred to keep out of it. But when once he had studied the Nicene
doctrine and found its agreement with his