regard to the Son it was declared that He was of the same numerical essence with the Father ; He is truly God, possessing the same at- triljutes anJ entitled to the same homage. Thus explained, the word became an insuperable barrier against the adoption of the Nicene Creed by any who denied the true divinity of the Son of God.
Difference of Opinion among the Me?nhers of the Council.
2. A second difficulty with which the Council had to contend, was diversity of opinion among its own members. All the conflict- ing views which had agitated the Church were there represented. The principal parties were, first, the Arians, who held, (1.) That the Son owed his existence to the will of tlie Father. (2.) That He was not eternal ; but that there was a time when He was not. (3.) That He was created e| ovk ovtwv, out of nothing, and was therefore Krlaixa koI 7ron/jU,a. (^4.) That He was not immutable, but TpcTTTos (})v(TeL. (5.) That liis preeminence consisted in the fact that He alone was created immediately by God, whereas all other creatures were created by the Son. (6.) He was not God of Him- self, but was made God, i6eo7roLr]6r] ; that is, on account of his ex- alted nature, and the relation in which He stands to all other crea- tures, as Creator and Governor, He was entitled to divine worship.
One of the passages of Scripture on which the Arians principally relied was Prov. viii. 22, which in the Septuagint is rendered : e/cTto-e //.€ apxrjv oSu)v airov (He created me in the beginning of his ways). As Wisdom, there spoken of, was universally understood to be the Logos, and as the Septuagint was regarded as authorita- tive, this passage seemed to prove, beyond dispute, that the Logos or Son was created. The Orthodox were forced to explain away this passage by saying that ktl^uv was here to be taken in the sense of yevvai', the word elsewhere used to express the relation between the Father and the Son. Ignorance, or neglect of the Hebrew, prevented their answering the argument of the Arians by showing that the word r\2^ here rendered by the Septuagint cKTiae, means not onl}'- to establish, but to possess. The Vulgate, therefore, correctly renders the passage, " Dominus possidet me ; " and the English version also reads, " The Lord possessed me." The Arians proper constituted a small minority of the Council.
The Semi-Arians. The second party included the Semi-Arians and the disciples of Origen. These held with the Arians, (1.) That the Sou owed
456 PART L — THEOLOGY. [Ch. VI. - The Trinitt.
his existence to the will of the Father. (2.) That He was not of the same essence, but erepos /car' oiaiav. They seemed to hold that there was an essence intermediate between the divine substance and created substances. It was in reference to this form of opin- • ion that Augustine afterwards said,^ " Unde liquido apparet ipsum factum non esse per quem facta sunt omnia. Et si factus non est, creatura non est: si autem creatura non est, ejusdem cum Patre substantias est. Omnis enim substantia quae Deus non est, crea- tura est ; et quse creatura non est, Deus est."
(3.) The Son was, therefore, subordinate to the Fatlier, not merely in rank or mode of subsistence, but in nature. He be- longed to a different order of beings. He was not avro^eos, 6 ©eos, or, 6 aXrjOivo'i 6e6<; ; but simply 6e6^, a term which, according to Ori- gen, could be properly applied to the higher orders of intelligent creatures.
(4.) The Son, although thus inferior to the Father, having life in Himself, was the source of life, i. e., the Creator.
(5.) The Holy Spirit, according to most of the Arians and to Ox'igen, was created by the Son, — the first and highest of the creatures called into being by his power.
The Orthodox. The third party in the Council were the Orthodox, who consti- tuted the great majority. All Christians were the worshippers of Christ. He was to them the object of supreme love and the ground of their confidence ; to Him they were subject in heart and life. They looked to Him for everything. He was their God in the highest sense of the word. He was, moreover, in their apprehen- sion, a distinct person, and not merely another name for the Father. But as the conviction was no less deeply rooted in the minds of Chi-istians, that there is only one God or divine Being, the problem which the Council had to solve was to harmonize these apparently incompatible convictions, namely, that there is only one God, and yet that the Father is God, and the Son, as a distinct person, is God, the same in substance and equal in power and glory. The only thing to be done was, to preserve the essential elements of the doctrine, and yet not make the statement of it self-contradic- tory. To meet these conditions, the Council framed the following Creed, namely, "We believe in one God, the Father almighty, the maker of all things visible and invisible ; and in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, only begotten, begotten of the Father, that
1 De Trinitale, i. vi. 9, edit. Benedictines, vol. viii. p. 1161, c.