al of Hilary.]

The fall of Liberius and Osius reflected a brighter lustre on the
firmness of those bishops who still adhered, with unshaken fidelity,
to the cause of Athanasius and religious truth. The ingenious malice
of their enemies had deprived them of the benefit of mutual comfort and
advice, separated those illustrious exiles into distant provinces, and
carefully selected the most inhospitable spots of a great empire.
[130] Yet they soon experienced that the deserts of Libya, and the
most barbarous tracts of Cappadocia, were less inhospitable than the
residence of those cities in which an Arian bishop could satiate,
without restraint, the exquisite rancor of theological hatred. [131]
Their consolation was derived from the consciousness of rectitude
and independence, from the applause, the visits, the letters, and the
liberal alms of their adherents, [132] and from the satisfaction
which they soon enjoyed of observing the intestine divisions of the
adversaries of the Nicene faith. Such was the nice and capricious
taste of the emperor Constantius; and so easily was he offended by the
slightest deviation from his imaginary standard of Christian truth,
that he persecuted, with equal zeal, those who defended the
consubstantiality, those who asserted the similar substance, and those
who denied the likeness of the Son of God. Three bishops, degraded and
banished for those adverse opinions, might possibly meet in the same
place of exile; and, according to the difference of their temper, might
either pity or insult the blind enthusiasm of their antagonists, whose
present sufferings would never be compensated by future happiness.

[Footnote 130: The confessors of the West were successively banished to
the deserts of Arabia or Thebais, the lonely places of Mount Taurus, the
wildest parts of Phrygia, which were in the possession of the impious
Montanists, &c. When the heretic Aetius was too favorably entertained at
Mopsuestia in Cilicia, the place of his exile was changed, by the advice
of Acacius, to Amblada, a district inhabited by savages and infested by
war and pestilence. Philostorg. l. v. c. 2.]

[Footnote 131: See the cruel treatment and strange obstinacy of
Eusebius, in his own letters, published by Baronius, A.D. 356, No.
92-102.]

[Footnote 132: Caeterum exules satis constat, totius orbis studiis
celebratos pecuniasque eis in sumptum affatim congestas, legationibus
quoque plebis Catholicae ex omnibus fere provi