meaning,
either could be used unsoundly. Again, he reminded them of the difficulty
inherent in attempts to express exactly in one language a difficult
technical phrase from another. Hilary, as the first person in Gaul to
write ecclesiastical and religious treatises in Latin, instead of the then
more familiar Greek, felt this difficulty keenly; as our own Bede did when
he tried to put Caedmon's Creation song into Latin. And he warned them
against misconceiving the views of others; pointing out that while they
suspected the Oriental bishops of doubting the coequality of the Son of
God with the Father, the Oriental bishops suspected them of doubting the
distinction between the Father and the Son. Hilary had been, before his
conversion to Christianity, a highly-trained and cultured official of his
Gallo-Roman city, and he wrote this treatise with force and insight on
very difficult subjects. It was a compliment to the bishops of any church
that such a document should be addressed to them. We learn in the sequel
that Hilary's views of comprehension prevailed; but we have no means of
determining what was the share of the British in this result. I need
probably not go further in the records of British connection with
ecclesiastical events on the continent.

It may have seemed to you rather barren, this talk of Councils. But it is
in reality far from being barren talk. It shews us the representatives of
the British Church in the full swim of ecclesiastical affairs; summoned as
a matter of course to the greatest councils; addressed as a matter of
course by the greatest writer of their quarter of the world; taking their
share in the settlement of the most subtle and vital points of Christian
faith and practice. At Arles, they dealt with the question, so practical
after Diocletian's recent persecution, how men were to be re-admitted to
the Church, who in time of persecution had fallen away. They decided,
further, one of the gravest questions they could have had to decide,
whether baptism in the name of the blessed Trinity was valid baptism, even
though a schismatic had administered the rite. Their decision was against
re-baptism in such cases, a fact of which I may have time to remind you
when I speak of some of the practices of the British Church; admission by
the laying on of hands was to suffice. They also determined that Easter
must be kept everywhere on one and the same day, again a fact which
reappears very prominently in th