stian schools were also founded and
endowed by the emperors; and learning, as well as wealth, was thus
brought in contact with the Faith.

[Sidenote: Church honoured by the world.]

Christian Rome soon became a great instrument in God's hands for
extending the influence of the Church even amongst little-known and
uncivilized nations; and as persecution ceased to try the earnestness
of those who embraced the religion of Christ, and the name of Christian
came to be treated with respect instead of with scorn, the Church began
to assume a position somewhat like that which she holds in our own day.
[Sidenote: Discipline relaxed.] The profession of {68} Christianity
under these circumstances was naturally more of a matter of course with
many of those who had grown up under its shadow, than when, in earlier
times, such a profession was likely to involve loss and suffering, and
even death itself, and discipline was gradually and necessarily relaxed
from the severity needful in the days of persecution.

Section 2. _Internal Trials of the Church._

[Sidenote: Heresy gathers strength in prosperity,]

The Church being thus firmly settled and delivered from outer enemies,
was now to find troubles within. Even from the days of St. John the
Divine heresies respecting the Person of our Blessed Lord had been
rife; but these open denials of the Divinity of the Great Head of the
Church had been successfully opposed without their leaving behind them
any very lasting trace. [Sidenote: and is of a more dangerous nature.]
Errors of a more subtle class followed, amounting in reality to
unbelief in our Saviour's Godhead, but expressing that unbelief by
assailing the teaching of the Church respecting His nature as Very God
or as Very Man.

[Sidenote: Arianism.]

This species of error culminated in the heresy of Arius, who denied
that the Second Person of the Holy Trinity was co-equal, co-eternal,
and of One Substance with the Father, and whose false teaching was more
widely listened to and followed than that of any of his predecessors in
misbelief. Arianism, and various forms of error consequent upon it,
long afflicted the Church, especially in the East, and the Emperor
Constantine himself seems at one time to have had a leaning towards the
theories of Arius.

{69}

Section 3. _The General Councils._

[Sidenote: The remedy provided for heresy.]

The full tide of the Arian heresy was, however, not suffered to come
upon the C