als could ever quench in Athanasius the pure
spirit of hope which glows in his youthful work. Slight as our sketch of
it has been, it will be enough to show his combination of religious
intensity with a speculative insight and a breadth of view reminding us
of Origen. If he fails to reach the mystery of sinlessness in man, and
is therefore not quite free from a Sabellianising view of the Lord's
humanity as a mere vesture of his divinity, he at least rises far above
the barren logic of the Arians. We shall presently have to compare him
with the next great Eastern thinker, Apollinarius of Laodicea.

[Sidenote: Attraction of Arianism: (1.) For superficial thinkers.]

Yet there were many men whom Arianism suited by its shallowness. As soon
as Christianity was established as a lawful worship by the edict of
Milan in 312, the churches were crowded with converts and inquirers of
all sorts. A church which claims to be universal cannot pick and choose
like a petty sect, but must receive all comers. Now these were mostly
heathens with the thinnest possible varnish of Christianity, and
Arianism enabled them to use the language of Christians without giving
up their heathen ways of thinking. In other words, the world was ready
to accept the gospel as a sublime monotheism, and the Lord's divinity
was the one great stumbling-block which seemed to hinder its conversion.
Arianism was therefore a welcome explanation of the difficulty. Nor was
the attraction only for nominal Christians like these. Careless
thinkers--sometimes thinkers who were not careless--might easily suppose
that Arianism had the best of such passages as 'The Lord created me,'[3]
or 'The Father is greater than I.'[4] Athanasius constantly complains of
the Arian habit of relying on isolated passages like these without
regard to their context or to the general scope and drift of Scripture.

[Footnote 3: Prov. viii. 22, LXX mistranslation.]

[Footnote 4: John xiv. 28.]

[Sidenote: (2.) To thoughtful men.]

Nor was even this all. The Lord's divinity was a real difficulty to
thoughtful men. They were still endeavouring to reconcile the
philosophical idea of God with the fact of the incarnation. In point of
fact, the two things are incompatible, and one or the other would have
to be abandoned. The absolute simplicity of the divine nature is
consistent with a merely external Trinity, or with a merely economic
Trinity, with an Arian Trinity of one increate and two created