rs to the Son a
relation not unlike that of the Son to the Father. Thus the Arian
trinity of divine persons forms a descending series, separated by
infinite degrees of honour and glory, resembling the philosophical triad
of orders of spiritual existence, extending outwards in concentric
circles.

[Sidenote: Criticism of it.]

Indeed the system is heathen to the core. The Arian Christ is nothing
but a heathen idol invented to maintain a heathenish Supreme in heathen
isolation from the world. Never was a more illogical theory devised by
the wit of man. Arius proclaims a God of mystery, unfathomable to the
Son of God himself, and goes on to argue as if the divine generation
were no more mysterious than its human type. He forgets first that
metaphor would cease to be metaphor if there were nothing beyond it;
then that it would cease to be true if its main idea were misleading. He
presses the metaphor of sonship as if mere human relations could exhaust
the meaning of the divine; and soon works round to the conclusion that
it is no proper sonship at all. In his irreverent hands the Lord's deity
is but the common right of mankind, his eternity no more than the beasts
themselves may claim. His clumsy logic overturns every doctrine he is
endeavouring to establish. He upholds the Lord's divinity by making the
Son of God a creature, and then worships him to escape the reproach of
heathenism, although such worship, on his own showing, is mere idolatry.
He makes the Lord's manhood his primary fact, and overthrows that too by
refusing the Son of Man a human soul. The Lord is neither truly God nor
truly man, and therefore is no true mediator. Heathenism may dream of a
true communion with the Supreme, but for us there neither is nor ever
can be any. Between our Father and ourselves there is a great gulf
fixed, which neither he nor we can pass. Now that we have heard the
message of the Lord, we know the final certainty that God is darkness,
and in him is no light at all. If this be the sum of the whole matter,
then revelation is a mockery, and Christ is dead in vain.

[Sidenote: Athanasius _de Incarnatione_.]

Arius was but one of many who were measuring the heights of heaven with
their puny logic, and sounding the deeps of Wisdom with the plummet of
the schools. Men who agreed in nothing else agreed in this practical
subordination of revelation to philosophy. Sabellius, for example, had
reduced the Trinity to three successive manif