602 THIRD PEEIOD. A.D. 311-590.
with a deep religious earnestness and a certain mysticism, and at the same time with the Grecian curiosity and disputatiousness, wliicli afterwards rather injured than promoted her inward life. Gi'egory Nazianzen, who lived in Constantinople in the midst of the Arian wars, describes the division ami hostility which this polemic spirit introduced between parents and children, husbands and wives, old and young, masters and slaves, priests and people. " It has gone so far tliat the whole mai'ket resounds with the discourses of lieretics, every banquet is corrupted by this babbling even to nausea, every merrymaking is transformed into a mourning, and every funeral solemnity is almost alleviated by this brawling as a still greater evil; even the chambers of women, the nurseries of simplicity, are disturbed thereby, and the flowers of modesty are crushed by this precocious practice of dispute." ' Chrysostom, like Melanchthon at a later day, had much to sufi'er from the theological pugnacity of his times.
The history of the Niccne age shows clearly that the church of God carries the heavenly treasure in earthly vessels. The Reformation of the sixteenth century was likewise in fact an incessant war, in which impure personal and political motives of every kind had play, and even the best men often violated the apostolic injunction to speak the truth in love. But we must not forget that the passionate and intolerant dogmatism of that time was based upon deep moral earnestness and strong faith, and so far forth stands vastly above the tolerance of indiffcrentism, which lightly plays with the truth or not rarely strikes out in most vehement intolerance against the faith. (Remember the first French revolution.) The oveiTuling of divine Providence in the midst of these wild conflicts is unmistakable, and the victory of the truth appears the greater for the violence of error. God uses all sorts of men for his instruments, and brings evil passions as well as good into his service. The Spirit of truth guided the church through the rush and the din of contending parties, and always triumphed over error in the end.
' Orat. xxvii. 2 (Opera, torn. i. p. 488). Comp. Orat. ixxii. (torn. L p. 58l Carmen de rita sua, vers. 1210 sqq. (torn. ii. p. 737 sq.).
§ 117. DOCTKINAL IMPORTANCE, ETC. 603
The ecumenical councils were the open battle-fields, upou which the victory of orthodoxy was decided. The doctrinal 'lecrees of these councils contain the results of the most profound discussions respecting the Trinity and the person of Christ ; and the Church to this day has not gone essentially beyond those decisions.
The Greek church wrought out Theology and Christology, while the Latin church demoted itself to Anthropology and Soteriology, The one, true to the genius of the Greek nationality, was predominantly speculative, dialectical, impulsive, and restless; the other, in keeping with the Ron^an character, was practical, ti'aditional, uniform, consistent, and steady. The former followed the stimulation of Origen and the Alexandrian school ; the latter received its impulse from Tertullian and Cyprian, and reached its theological height in Jerome and Augustine. The speculative inclination of the Greek church appeared even in its sermons, which not rarely treated of the number of worlds, the idea of matter, the different classes of higher spirits, the relation of the three hypostases in the Godhead, and similar abstruse questions. The Latin church also, however, had a deep spirit of investigation (as we see in Tertullian and Augustine), took an active part in the trinitarian and christological controversies of the East, and decided the victory of orthodoxy by the weight of its authority. The Greek church almost exhausted its productive force in those great struggles, proved indifferent to the deeper conception of sin and grace, as developed by Augustine, and after the council of Chalcedon degenerated theologically into scholastic formalism and idle refinements.
The fourth and fifth centuries are the flourishing, classical period of the patristic theology and of the Christian Grseco- Roman civilization. In the second half of the fifth century the West Roman empire, with these literary treasures, went down amidst the storms of the gi'eat migration, to take a new and higher sweep in the Germano-Roman form under Charlemagne. In the Eastern empire scholarship was better maintained, and a certain connection with antiquity was preserved through the medium of the Greek language. But ap the Greek