Scriptures declare". He would also have refused to repeat the words
which assert the Godhead of the Holy Spirit. These were important
differences, but it will be seen at once that they were not so broad as
those which now generally separate "orthodox" from "heterodox"
theologians.

The reasons which led the barbarian invaders of the Empire to accept the
Arian form of Christianity are not yet fully disclosed to us. The cause
could not be an uncultured people's preference for a simple faith, for
the Arian champions were at least as subtle and technical in their
theology as the Athanasian, and often surpassed them in these qualities.
It is possible that some remembrances of the mythology handed down to
them by their fathers made them willing to accept a subordinate Christ,
a spiritualised "Balder the Beautiful", divine yet subject to death,
standing as it were upon the steps of his father's throne, rather than
the dogma, too highly spiritualised for their apprehension, of One God
in Three Persons. But probably the chief cause of the Arianism of the
German invaders was the fact that the Empire itself was to a great
extent Arian when they were in friendly relations with it, and were
accepting both religion and civilisation at its hands, in the middle
years of the fourth century.

The most powerful factor in this change, the man who more than all
others was responsible for the conversion of the Germanic races to
Christianity, in its Arian form, was the Gothic Bishop, Ulfilas
(311-381), whose construction of an Alphabet and translation of the
Scriptures into the language of his fellow-countrymen have secured for
him imperishable renown among all who are interested in the history of
human speech. Ulfilas, who has been well termed "The Apostle of the
Goths", seems to have embraced Christianity as a young man when he was
dwelling in Constantinople as a hostage (thus in some measure
anticipating the part which one hundred and thirty years later was to be
played by Theodoric), and having been ordained first Lector (Reader) and
afterwards (341) Bishop of Gothia, he spent the remaining forty years of
his life in missionary journeys among his countrymen in Dacia, in
collecting those of his converts who fled from the persecution of their
still heathen rulers, and settling them as colonists in Moesia, and, most
important of all, in his great work of the translation of the Bible into
Gothic. Of this work, as is well known, some precious