n frivolity. Above all, society was heathen to an
extent we can hardly realise. The two religions were strangely mixed.
The heathens on their side never quite understood the idea of
worshipping one God only; while crowds of nominal Christians never asked
for baptism unless a dangerous illness or an earthquake scared them, and
thought it quite enough to show their faces in church once or twice a
year. Meanwhile, they lived just like the heathens round them, steeped
in superstitions like their neighbours, attending freely their immoral
games and dances, and sharing in the sins connected with them. Thus
Arianism had many affinities with heathenism, in its philosophical idea
of the Supreme, in its worship of a demigod of the vulgar type, in its
rhetorical methods, and in its generally lower moral tone. Heathen
influences therefore strongly supported Arianism.

[Sidenote: (2.) Jews.]

The Jews also usually took the Arian side. They were still a power in
the world, though it was long since Israel had challenged Rome to
seventy years of internecine contest for the dominion of the East. But
they had never forgiven her the destruction of Jehovah's temple.
[Sidenote: A.D. 66-135.] Half overcome themselves by the spell of the
eternal Empire, they still looked vaguely for some Eastern deliverer to
break her impious yoke. Still more fiercely they resented her adoption
of the gospel, which indeed was no tidings of good-will or peace to
them, but the opening of a thousand years of persecution. Thus they were
a sort of caricature of the Christian churches. They made every land
their own, yet were aliens in all. They lived subject to the laws of the
Empire, yet gathered into corporations governed by their own. They were
citizens of Rome, yet strangers to her imperial comprehensiveness. In a
word, they were like a spirit in the body, but a spirit of uncleanness
and of sordid gain. If they hated the Gentile, they could love his vices
notwithstanding. If the old missionary zeal of Israel was extinct, they
could still purvey impostures for the world. Jewish superstitions were
the plague of distant Spain, the despair of Chrysostom at Antioch. Thus
the lower moral tone of Arianism and especially its denial of the Lord's
divinity were enough to secure it a fair amount of Jewish support as
against the Nicenes. At Alexandria, for example, the Jews were always
ready for lawless outrage at the call of every enemy of Athanasius.

[Sidenote: (3.)