s spent his life; and if he learned too much of the Galatian
party spirit, he learned also that the gospel is wider than the forms of
Greek philosophy. The speculations of Alexandrian theology were as
little appreciated by the Celts of Asia as is the stately churchmanship
of England by the Celts of Wales. They were the foreigner's thoughts,
too cold for Celtic zeal, too grand for Celtic narrowness. Fickleness is
not inconsistent with a true and deep religious instinct, and we may
find something austere and high behind the ever-changing phases of
spiritual excitement. Thus the ideal holiness of the church, upheld by
Montanists and Novatians, attracted kindred spirits at opposite ends of
the Empire, among the Moors of the Atlas and the Gauls of Asia. Such a
people will have sins and scandals like its neighbours, but very little
indifference or cynicism. It will be more inclined to make of Christian
liberty an excuse for strife and debate. The zeal which carries the
gospel to the loneliest mountain villages will also fill them with the
jealousies of endless quarrelling sects; and the Gaul of Asia clung to
his separatism with all the more tenacity for the consciousness that his
race was fast dissolving in the broader and better world of Greece. Thus
Marcellus was essentially a stranger to the wider movements of his time.
His system is an appeal from Origen to St. John, from philosophy to
Scripture. Nor can we doubt the high character and earnest zeal of the
man who for years stood side by side with Athanasius. The more
significant therefore is the failure of his bold attempt to cut the knot
of controversy.

[Sidenote: Doctrine of Marcellus.]

Marcellus then agreed with the Arians that the idea of sonship implies
beginning and inferiority, so that a Son of God is neither eternal nor
equal to the Father. When the Arians argued on both grounds that the
Lord is a creature, the conservatives were content to reply that the
idea of sonship excludes that of creation, and implies a peculiar
relation to and origin from the Father. But their own position was weak.
Whatever they might say, their secondary God was a second God, and their
theory of the eternal generation only led them into further
difficulties, for their concession of the Son's origin from the will of
the Father made the Arian conclusion irresistible. Marcellus looked
scornfully on a lame result like this. The conservatives had broken down
because they had gone astray a