he regards an incomprehensible mystery. He is content to define the actual distinction between Father and Son, by say. ing that the former is God revealing himself, the latter God revealed; the one is the ground of revelation, the other the actual appearing revelation itself. Here he calls the Father the invisible of the Son, and the Son or Logos, the visible of the Father. This is evidently a very close approach to the Nicene homoousia. As to the Trinity, Irenæus goes no further than the baptismal formula and the Trinity of revelation; proceeding on the hypothesis of three successive stages in the development of the kingdom of God on earth, and of a progressive communication of God to the world. He also represents the relation of the persons according to Eph. 4: 6, the Father as above all, and the head of Christ; the Son as through all, and the head of the church; the Spirit as in all, and the fountain of the water of life.' Of a supra-mundane Trinity of essence, he betrays but faint indications.

Tertullian (died about 120) advances a step. He supposes a distinction in God himself, and on the principle that the created image affords a key to the uncreated original, he illustrates the distinction in the divine nature by the analogy of human thought; the necessity of a self-projection, or a making one's self objective in word, for which he borrows from the Valentinians the term poßoλn or prolatio rei alterius ex altera, but without connecting with it the sensuous emanation theory of the Gnostics. Otherwise he stands on subordinatian ground, if his comparisons of the Trinitarian relation to that of root, stem, and fruit, or fountain, flow, and brook, or sun, ray, and raipoint, be dogmatically pressed. Yet he directly asserts also the essential

2 Adv. Prax. c. 8.

1 Adv. Haereses, V. 18, § 2. 3 Tertius says he, Adv. Prax. c. 8.- -est Spiritus a Deo et Filio, sicut ter tius a radice fructus ex frutice, et tertius a fonte rivus ex flumine, et tertius a sole ex radio. Nihil tamen a matrice alienatur, a qua proprietates suas ducit. Ita trinitas (here this word appears for the first time, comp. c. 2: oikovouía quae unitatem in trinitatem disponit) per consertos (al. consortes) et connexos gradus a Patre decurrens et monarchiae nihil obstrepit et oikovouías statum protegit. Further, above he says: Nam et radix et frutex duae res sunt, sed conjunctae; et fons et flumen duae species sunt, sed indivisae; et sol et radius duae formae

unity of the three persons.1 But then this seems to be meant only in a limited sense; for in another passage he bluntly calls the Father the whole divine substance, and the Son a part of it, appealing for this view to John 14: 28: "My Father is greater than I" (which must be understood to apply only to the Christ of history, the λόγος ἔνσαρκος, and not to the λόγος ἄσαρκος). In other respects Tertullian prepared the way for a clearer distinction between the Trinity of essence and the Trinity of revelation. He teaches a threefold hypostatical existence of the Son (filiatio): 1. The preëxistent, eternal immanence of the Son in the Father; they being as inseparable as reason and word in man, who was created in the image of God, and hence in a measure reflects his being. 2. The coming forth of the Son with the Father, for the purpose of the creation. 3. The manifestation of the Son in the world by the incarnation. The Pneumatology figures very prominently in the Montanistic system, and consequently, also, in Tertullian's theology. He made the Holy Spirit the principle of the highest stage of revelation and the proper essence of the church, but subordinated him to the Son, as he did the Son to the Father; though elsewhere he asserts the unitas substantia.

With equal energy Hippolytus (died about 235), in his recently discovered "Philosophoumena," or, Refutation of all Heresies, combated Patripassianism, and insisted on the recognition of different hypostases, with equal claim to divine worship. Yet he, too, is somewhat trammelled with the subordinatian view.

The same may be said of Novatian, of Rome, the schismatic but orthodox contemporary of Cyprian, and author of a special treatise (De Trinitate) drawn from the

sunt, sed cohaerentes. Omne quod prodit ex aliquo secundum sit eius necesse est de quo prodit, non ideo tamen est separatum.

C 2: Tres autem non statu, sed gradu, nec substantia, sed forma, nec potestate, sed specie, unius autem substantiae et unius status, et unius potestatis, quia unus Deus, ex quo et gradus isti et formae et species, in nomine Patris et Filii et Spiritus Sancti deputantur.

2 Adv. Prax. c. 9: Pater tota substantia est, Filius vero derivatio totius et portio.

Creed, and fortified with Scripture proofs, against the two classes of Monarchians.

The Roman bishop Dionysius (A. D. 262) stood nearest the Nicene doctrine, and may be said to have clearly anticipated it. He maintained distinctly, in the controversy with Dionysius of Alexandria, a pupil of Origen, at once the unity of essence and the real personal distinction of the three members of the divine triad, and avoided Tritheism, Sabellianism, and Subordinatianism, with the instinct of orthodoxy, and also, it must be admitted, with the art of anathematizing already familiar to the popes of that age. His view has come down to us in a fragment in Athanasius, where it is said: "Then I must declare against those who annihilate the most sacred doctrine of the Church, by divid ing and dissolving the unity of God into three powers, separate hypostases, and three deities." This notion (some tritheistic view, not further known to us) is just the opposite of the opinion of Sabellius; for while the latter would introduce the impious doctrine, that the Son is the same as the Father, and the converse, the former teach in some sense three Gods, by dividing the sacred unity into three fully separate hypostases. But the divine Logos must be inseparably united with the God of all, and in God also the Holy Ghost must dwell, so that the divine triad must be comprehended in one, viz.: the all-ruling God, as in a head." Then he condemns the doctrine that the Son is a creature, as "the height of blasphemy," and concludes: " The divine adorable unity must not be thus cut up into three deities; no more may the transcendent dignity and greatness of the Lord be lowered by saying the Son is created; but we must believe in God, the Almighty Father, and in Jesus Christ his Son, and in the Holy Ghost, and must consider the Logos inseparably united with the God of all; for he says: I and my Father are one; and, I am in the Father, and the Father in me. In this way are both the divine triad and the

1 Τὴν θείαν τριάδα εἰς ἕνα ὥσπερ εἰς κοραφήν τινα, τὸν θεὸν τῶν ὅλων τὸν παντοκράτορα λέγω, συγκεφαλαιοῖσθαι τε καὶ συνάγεσθαι πᾶσα ἀνάγκη.

sacred doctrine of the unity of the Godhead preserved inviolate."

This is by far the clearest ante-Nicene statement of the Nicene faith, and closes the development of the dogma within the period to which our essay is limited.

But this is only the positive part of our discussion. To understand it properly, we must now pass under review the Unitarian antithesis in the same period. For this view of the Trinity, which was then more fully brought out in the Arian and semi-Arian controversies of the Nicene age, and finally settled by the oecumenical councils of Nice, A. D. 325, and of Constantinople, A. D. 381, was already in this less definite ante-Nicene form, in great part the result of a conflict with the opponents of the Trinity, who flourished in the third century. These Antitrinitarians are commonly called Monarchians, or Unitarians, on account of the stress they laid upon the unity (povapxía) of God.

But we must carefully distinguish among them two opposite classes the rationalistic, or dynamic Monarchians, who denied the divinity of Christ, or explained it as a mere power (dúvaus); and the Patripassian Monarchians, who identified the Son with the Father, and admitted, at most, only a modal Trinity, a threefold mode of revelation. The first form of this heresy, involved in the abstract Jewish Monotheism, deistically sundered the divine and the human, and rose little above Elionism. The second proceeded, at least in part, from pantheistic preconceptions, and approached the ground of Gnostic Docetism. The one pre

judiced the dignity of the Son, the other the dignity of the Father; yet the latter was by far the more profound and Christian, and accordingly met with the greater acceptance.

I. The Monarchians of the first class saw in Christ a mere man, filled with divine power; but conceived this divine power as operative in him, not from the baptism only, according to the Ebionite view, but from the beginning; and admitted his supernatural generation by the Holy Ghost. To this class belong:

1. The Alogians (from ȧ and Xóyos, unreasonable and op

ponents of the Logos), a heretical sect in Asia Minor, about A. D. 170, of which very little is known. Epiphanius gave them this name, because in the Monarchian interest they rejected the Logos doctrine and the Logos gospel. In opposition to Montanism, they likewise rejected Chiliasm and the Apocalypse. They attributed the writings of John to the Gnostic Cerinthus.

2. The Theodotians; so called from their founder, the tanner Theodotus. He sprang from Byzantium; denied Christ in a persecution, with the apology that he only denied a man; but still held him to be the supernaturally begotten Messiah. He gained followers in Rome, but was excommunicated by the bishop, Victor (192-202). After his death, his sect chose the confessor Natalis bishop, who is said to have afterwards penitently returned into the bosom of the Catholic Church. A younger Theodotus, the "money-changer," put Melchisedek as mediator between God and the angels, above Christ, the mediator between God and men; and his followers were called Melchisedekians.

3. The Artemonites, or adherents of Artemon, who came out somewhat later, at Rome, with a similar opinion; declared the doctrine of the divinity of Christ an innovation, and a relapse to heathen polytheism; and was excommunicated by Zephyrinus (202-217). The Artemonites were charged with placing Euclid and Aristotle above Christ, and esteeming mathematics and dialectics higher than the gospel. This indicates a critical intellectual turn, averse to mystery, and shows that Aristotle was employed, by some, against the divinity of Christ, as Plato was engaged for it. Their assertion, that the true doctrine was obscured in the Roman Church only from the time of Zephyrinus (Euseb. V. 28), is explained by the fact, brought to light recently, through the Philosophoumena of Hippolytus, that Zephyrinus (and perhaps his predecessor, Victor), against the vehement opposition of a portion of the Roman Church, favored Patripassianism, and probably in behalf of this doctrine, condemned the Artemonites.