In the end Acacius and many of his friends were deposed or excommunicated. Some of these, however, in defiance of the sentence of the Council, returned to their dioceses, as did also the majority who had deposed them.
It is not expressly stated whether any formal decision on the case of Cyril was adopted by the Council: but as his name does not appear in the lists of those who were deposed or excommunicated, it is certain that he was not condemned. It is most probable that the charges against him were disregarded after his accuser Acacius had refused to appear, and that he returned, like the others, to his diocese. But he was not to be left long in peace. Acacius and some of his party had hastened to Constantinople, where they gained over to their cause the chief men attached to the palace, and through their influence secured the favour of Constantius, and roused his anger against the majority of the Council. But what especially stirred the Emperor's wrath were the charges which Acacius concocted against Cyril: "For," he said that "the holy robe which the Emperor Constantine of blessed memory, in his desire to honour the Church of Jerusalem, had presented to Macarius, the Bishop of that city, to be worn when he administered the rite of Holy Baptism, all fashioned as it was with golden threads, had been sold by Cyril, and bought by one of the dancers at the theatre, who had put it on, and while dancing had fallen, and injured himself, and died. With such an ally as this Cyril," he said, "they undertake to judge and pass sentence upon the rest of the world [46] ."
Ten deputies who at the close of the Council of Seleucia had been appointed to report its proceedings to the Emperor, "met, on their arrival at the Court, the deputies of the Council of Ariminum, and likewise the partisans of Acacius [47] . After much controversy and many intrigues, a mutilated and ambiguous Creed adopted at Ariminum in which the homoousios of Nicæa was replaced by "like to the Father that begat Him according to the Scriptures," and the mention of either "essence" (ousia) or "subsistence" (hupostasis) condemned [48] , was brought forward and approved by the Emperor. "After having, on the last day of the year 359, discussed the matter with the Bishops till far into the night [49] , he at length extorted their signatures....It is in this connexion that Jerome says: Ingemuit totus orbis, et Arianum se esse miratus est [50] ." Early in the following year, 360 a.d., through the influence of Acacius a new Synod was held at Constantinople, in which, among other Semi-Arian Bishops, Cyril also was deposed on the charge of having held communion with Eustathius of Sebaste, Basil of Ancyra, and George of Laodicea. Cyril, as we have seen, had become acquainted with these Bishops during his residence at Tarsus in 358, at which time they were all zealous opponents of Acacius and his party, but differed widely in other respects.
George of Laodicea was a profligate in morals, and an Arian at heart, whose opposition to Acacius and Eudoxius was prompted by self-interest rather than by sincere conviction. He had been deposed from the priesthood by Alexander, Bishop of Alexandria, both on that ground of false doctrine, and of the open and habitual irregularities of his life. Athanasius styles him "the most wicked of all the Arians," reprobated even by his own party for his grossly dissolute conduct [51] .
Basil of Ancyra was a man of high moral character, great learning, and powerful intellect, a consistent opponent both of the Sabellianism of Marcellus, and of every form of Arian and Anomoean heresy, a chief among those of whom Athanasius wrote [52] , "We discuss the matter with them as brothers with brothers, who mean what we mean, and dispute only about the word (homoousios)....Now such is Basil who wrote from Ancyra concerning the Faith" (358 a.d., the same year in which Cyril met him at Tarsus).
Eustathius is described as a man unstable in doctrine, vacillating from party to party, subscribing readily to Creeds of various tendency, yet commanding the respect even of his enemies by a life of extraordinary holiness, in which active benevolence was combined with extreme austerity. "He was a man," says Mr. Gwatkin [53] , "too active to be ignored, too unstable to be trusted, too famous for ascetic piety to be lightly made an open enemy."
S. Basil the Great, when travelling from place to place, to observe the highest forms of ascetic life, had met with Eustathius at Tarsus, and formed a lasting friendship with a man whom he describes as "exhibiting something above human excellence," and of whom, after the painful dissensions which embittered Basil's later life, that great saint could say, that from childhood to extreme old age he (Eustathius) had watched over himself with the greatest care, the result of his self-discipline being seen in his life and character [54] .
Of any intimate friendship between Cyril, and these Semi-Arian leaders, we have no evidence in the vague charges of Acacius: their common fault was that they condemned him in the Synod of Seleucia. The true reason of Cyril's deposition, barely concealed by the frivolous charges laid against him, was the hatred of Acacius, incurred by the refusal to acknowledge the Metropolitan jurisdiction of the See of Cæsarea. The deposition was confirmed by Constantius, and followed by a sentence of banishment. The place of Cyril's exile is not mentioned; nor is it known whether he joined in the protest of the other deposed Bishops, described by S. Basil, Epist. 75. His banishment was not of longer continuance than two years. Constantius died on the 3rd of November, 361, and the accession of Julian was soon followed by the recall of all the exiled Bishops, orthodox and heretical, and the restoration of their confiscated estates [55] . Julian's object, according to Socrates, was " to brand the memory of Constantius by making him appear to have been cruel towards his subjects." An equally amiable motive imputed to him is mentioned by Sozomen: "It is said that he issued this order in their behalf not out of mercy, but that through contention among themselves the Church might be involved in fraternal strife [56] ." Cyril, returning with the other Bishops, seems to have passed through Antioch on his way home, and to have been well received by the excellent Bishop Meletius.
It happened that the son of a heathen priest attached to the Emperor's Court, having been instructed in his youth by a Deaconess whom he visited with his mother, had secretly become a Christian. On discovering this, his father had cruelly scourged and burnt him with hot spits on his hands, and feet, and back. He contrived to escape, and took refuge with his friend the Deaconess. "She dressed me in women's garments, and took me in her covered carriage to the divine Meletius. He handed me over to the Bishop of Jerusalem, at that time Cyril, and we started by night for Palestine.' After the death of Julian, this young man led his father also into the way of truth. This act he told me with the rest [57] ."
The next incident recorded in the life of S. Cyril is his alleged prediction of the failure of Julian's attempt to rebuild the Temple of Jerusalem. "The vain and ambitious mind of Julian," says Gibbon, "might aspire to restore the ancient glory of the Temple of Jerusalem. As the Christians were firmly persuaded that a sentence of everlasting destruction had been pronounced against the whole fabric of the Mosaic law, the Imperial sophist would have converted the success of his undertaking into a specious argument against the faith of prophecy and the truth of revelation." Again he writes: "The Christians entertained a natural and pious expectation, that in this memorable contest, the honour of religion would be vindicated by some signal miracle [58] ." That such an expectation may have been shared by Cyril is not impossible: but there is no satisfactory evidence that he ventured to foretell any miraculous interposition. According to the account of Rufinus [59] , "lime and cement had been brought, and all was ready for destroying the old foundations and laying new on the next day. But Cyril remained undismayed, and after careful consideration either of what he had read in Daniel's prophecy concerning the times,' or of our Lord's predictions in the Gospels, persisted that it was impossible that one stone should ever there be laid upon another by the Jews." This account of Cyril's expectation, though probable enough in itself, seems to be little more than a conjecture founded on his statement (Cat. xv. 15), that "Antichrist will come at the time when there shall not be left one stone upon another in the Temple of the Jews." That doom was not completed in Cyril's time, nor did he expect it to be fulfilled until the coming of the Jewish Antichrist, who was to restore the Temple shortly before the end of the world. It was impossible for Cyril to see in Julian such an Antichrist as he has described; and therefore, without any gift or pretence of prophecy, he might very well express a firm conviction that the attempted restoration at that time must fail. Though Gibbon is even more cynical and contemptuous than usual in his examination of the alleged miracles, he does not attempt to deny the main facts of the story [60] : with their miraculous character we are not here concerned, but only with Cyril's conduct on so remarkable an occasion.
In the same year, a.d. 363, Julian was killed in his Persian campaign on the 26th of June, and was succeeded by Jovian, whose universal tolerance, and personal profession of the Nicene faith, though discredited by the looseness of his morals, gave an interval of comparative rest to the Church. In his reign Athanasius was recalled, and Acacius and his friends subscribed the Nicene Creed, with an explanation of the sense in which they accepted the word homoousion [61] . As Cyril's name is not mentioned in any of the records of Jovian's short reign of seven months, we may infer that he dwelt in peace at Jerusalem.
Jovian died on the 17th of February, 364, and was succeeded by Valentinian, who in the following March gave over the Eastern provinces of the Empire to his brother Valens. During the first two years of the new reign we hear nothing of Cyril: but at the beginning of the year 366, on the death of his old enemy Acacius, Cyril assumed the right to nominate his successor in the See of Cæsarea, and appointed a certain Philumenus [62] . Whether this assumption of authority was in accordance with the 7th Canon of Nicæa may be doubted: Cyril's choice of his nephew was, however, in after times abundantly justified by the conduct and character of Gelasius, who is described by Theodoret as a man "distinguished by the purity of his doctrine, and the sanctity of his life," and is quoted by the same historian as "the admirable," and "the blessed Gelasius [63] ."
Epiphanius relates [64] that "after these three had been set up, and could do nothing on account of mutual contentions," Euzoius was appointed by the Arians, and held the See until the accession of Theodosius in a.d. 379, when he was deposed, and Gelasius restored. In the meantime Cyril had been a third time deposed and driven from Jerusalem, probably in the year 367. For at that time Valens, who had fallen under the influence of Eudoxius, the Arian Bishop of Constantinople, by whom he was baptized, "wrote to the Governors of the provinces, commanding that all Bishops who had been banished by Constantius, and had again assumed their sacerdotal offices under the Emperor Julian, should be ejected from their Churches [65] ." Of this third and longest banishment we have no particulars, but we may safely apply to it the words of the Synod at Constantinople, 382, that Cyril " had passed through very many contests with the Arians in various places."
The terrible defeat and miserable death of Valens in the great battle against the Goths at Adrianople (a.d. 378) brought a respite to the defenders of the Nicene doctrine. For Gratian "disapproved of the late persecution that had been carried on for the purpose of checking the diversities in religious Creeds, and recalled all those who had been banished on account of their religion [66] ." Gratian associated Theodosius with himself in the Empire on the 19th of January, 379; and "at this period," says Sozomen [67] , "all the Churches of the East, with the exception of that of Jerusalem, were in the hands of the Arians." Cyril, therefore, had been one of the first to return to his own See. During his long absence the Church of Jerusalem had been the prey both of Arianism and of the new heresy of Apollinarius, which had spread among the monks who were settled on Mount Olivet. Egyptian Bishops, banished for their orthodoxy, having taken refuge in Palestine, there found themselves excluded from communion. Jerusalem was given over to heresy and schism, to the violent strife of rival factions, and to extreme licentiousness of morals.