secondary importance. The sects of the early ages have so totally died
away that we hardly recall the meaning of their names, or determine
their essential dogmas. From fasting, penance, and the gift of money,
things which are of precise measurement, and therefore well suited to
intellectual infancy, there may be perceived an advancing orthodoxy up
to the highest metaphysical ideas. Yet it must not be supposed that new
observances and doctrines, as they emerged, were the disconnected
inventions of ambitious men. If rightly considered, they are, in the
aggregate, the product of the uniform progression of human opinions.

[Sidenote: Early variation of opinions.]

[Sidenote: Eastern theology tends to Divinity,]

[Sidenote: Western to Humanity.]

Authors who have treated of the sects of earlier times will point out to
the curious reader how, in the beginning, the Church was agitated by a
lingering attachment to the Hebrew rites, and with difficulty tore
itself away from Judaism, which for the first ten years was paramount in
it; how then, for several centuries, it became engrossed with disputes
respecting the nature of Christ, and creed after creed arose therefrom;
to the Ebionites he was a mere man; to the Docetes, a phantasm; to the
Jewish Gnostic, Cerinthus, possessed of a twofold nature; how, after the
spread of Christianity, in succeeding ages, all over the empire, the
intellectual peculiarities of the East and West were visibly impressed
upon it--the East filled with speculative doctrines, of which the most
important were those brought forward by the Platonists of Alexandria,
for the Platonists, of all Philosophical sects, furnished most converts;
the West, in accordance with its utilitarian genius, which esteems the
practical and disparages the intellectual, singularly aided by
propitious opportunity, occupying itself with material aggrandizement
and territorial power. The vanishing point of all Christian sectarian
ideas of the East was in God, of those of the West in Man. Herein
consists the essential difference between them. The one was rich in
doctrines respecting the nature of the Divinity, the other abounded in
regulations for the improvement and consolation of humanity. For long
there was a tolerance, and even liberality toward differences of
opinion. Until the Council of Nicea, no one was accounted a heretic if
only he professed his belief in the Apostles' Creed.

[Sidenote: Foreign modifications of Christ