But the conference at Nicæa was like the conference at Jerusalem, which is reported in the Acts of the Apostles. The fathers and brethren at Jerusalem disposed, as they thought, of the difficulties involved in the relationship of Christianity to Judaism. They put Judaism out. The resolved that the Christian Church was an independent society, in no wise bound by the ceremonial laws which were written in the Bible. It was not necessary, they said, to keep the law of Moses in order to be a Christian. But the apparently unanimous decision of the conference was only the beginning of the debate. St. Paul, all his life long, was hindered and opposed by conservative Christian brethren who refused to accept the rulings of the Council of Jerusalem. The matter was too great and vital to be finally determined by any single assembly.

So it was with the Council of Nicæ. Even on the journey home, the fathers who had signed the creed began to be perplexed. Some of them were plain persons who felt that they had involved themselves in metaphysics beyond their understanding. It seemed to them that the simplicity of the gospel had been lost in the debate. Some of them objected to the Nicene Creed on the ground that it had introduced into religion a new and unproved word, of which the apostles had no knowledge. Some of them perceived on reflection that the difficulties which had been revealed by Arius were real and serious, and were not satisfactorily settled by the taking of a vote. Certain influential bishops, such as Eusebius of Cæsarea and Eusebius of Nicomedia, had been on the side of Arius from the beginning, and had not been convinced by the action of the council. They had signed the creed, but with reservations. And these bishops were in a position to determine the opinion of the imperial court.

Moreover, in the air which all the Christians breathed was the spirit of paganism, with which Arianism was in subtle accord. Among the new Christians who had been attracted to the church, not by any deep conviction but by the imperial approval, there were many who had been nurtured in polytheism, to whom it seemed reasonable that there should be superior and inferior deities. It seemed to them that Arius, making Christ a lesser god, was reconciling Christianity with the doctrines of the philosophers, with the teachings of the ancient religions, and with the general wisdom of the world. Hardly, then, had the Nicene Creed been signed when the orthodox found themselves to their surprise, facing an Arian reaction.

In the long and bitter contention which ensued, the faith of Nicæa was defended and finally preserved by the courage and wisdom of Athanasius.

Athanasius was a native of Alexandria, where he had lived as a youth in the household of the bishop and had studied in the catechetical school. Before the meeting of the Council of Nicæa he had been ordained a deacon and had written a book on the Incarnation. When he accompanied Bishop Alexander to the council he was twenty-eight years of age. Soon after the adjournment of the council the bishop died, and Athanasius was chosen in his place. The city of Alexandria was at that time as preëminent in the East as Rome was in the West. Even the founding of Constantinople as a "New Rome" served rather to strengthen than to weaken the pride of the capital of Egypt. The bishops of the two cities contended for a supremacy which neither would yield to the other. Thus Athanasius was equipped for leadership by his high position, as well as by his strong conviction. At the same time the rivalry of the cities —Arian Constantinople against orthodox Alexandria—complicated the theological contention from the start.

The fist campaign in the war of the extended to the death of Constantine, in 337. The Nicene Creed remained formally in force, though many construed its articles so loosely as to defeat its purpose. Constantine would not permit any open attack upon it, but the bishops who were closest to him were friends of Arius. These Arian sympathizers and their followers busied themselves during the emperor's lifetime with attacks not upon the doctrine, but upon the administration of Athanasius.

The bishop of Alexandria held a difficult position. The clergy of the city could not forget the time when the bishop was not only elected but consecrated by themselves, and differed from them in office hardly more than a chairman differs from the members of a committee. They asserted a traditional independence. One of them had disturbed the episcopate of Alexander by ordaining priests and deacons in his own right. They were now divided by the controversy which Arius had started.

Moreover, the Meletians were making trouble. Meletius, a bishop of Upper Egypt, had taken the austere side in the debate concerning the restoration of apostates, against the compassionate position of the bishop of Alexandria of his day, and had established schismatic parishes which called themselves the "Churches of the Martyrs." These churches vexed the soul of Athanasius, and ha attacked them with the inconsiderate enthusiasm of youth. They complained of him to Constantine.

They said that Athanasius had sent emissaries to a Meletian priest named Ischyras, and that they had overthrown his altar and sacrilegiously broken his chalice. Athanasius was compelled to appear before Constantine and explain the matter. This he did by the testimony of witnesses who showed that messengers did indeed go from Athanasius, but that they found Ischyras ill in bed, so that any disturbance of a service was impossible.

Then they brought against the bishop the accusation of the Dead Hand. They said that he had murdered Arsenius, a Meletian bishop, and had cut off his right hand to use for the purposes of magic. Arsenius had certainly disappeared, and the accusers had the dead hand in their possession. To meet this charge, Athanasius was summoned to be tried by his brethren. The court sat at Tyre, in the church at whose consecration Esuebius had preached. The bishops who composed the council were of the Arian side. Athanasius was confronted by his enemies. Standing there, however, to be tried for murder, Athanasius to a veiled figure at the back of the church, and when this mysterious person came forward and removed his veil, behold the bishop Arsenius himself, not only alive, but having his two hands! Even the most hostile could hardly, under these circumstances, pronounce Athanasius guilty. They did, however, return to the charge of the broken chalice, and on that charge and other accusations of violent action condemned and deposed him.

Immediately, Athanasius took ship and went to Constantinople. He put himself in the way of the emperor and demanded a fair hearing. Thereupon the bishops, who had now gone to Jerusalem to consecrate the new church which Constantine, at the suggestion of Helena his mother, had built over the Holy Sepulchre, withdrew the matter of the chalice and accused Athanasius of threatening to hold back the corn fleet, which carried the produce of the granaries of Egypt to the markets of Constantinople. Then Constantine perceiving in the midst of these perplexities that Athanasius had many enemies, and probably suspecting that he had done something to deserve their hostility, cleared his mind of the matter, and restored, as he hoped, the peace of the church, by sending the accused bishop into banishment in Gaul.

During his residence in Gaul, Athanasius received word of the death of Arius. Arius had been recalled from exile by the influence of his friends at court, and had succeeded in convincing Constantine of his sufficient orthodoxy. The emperor had ordered the aged bishop of Constantinople to receive the heretic on a certain day in the church, and to admit him to the Holy Communion. So important an event—whether it indicated the conversion or the triumph of Arius—was to be made an occasion of some festivity. The heretic was to go to the sacrament attended by a procession of his friends. But Arius was overtaken by a sudden hemorrhage, and his friends found him dead. Thus he passed out of the world into which he had introduced so much confusion, a man of eighty years, honest, devout, of stainless character, having the courage of his convictions, maintaining what he believed to be the truth in the face of the church which he believed to be mistaken, suffering hatred and exile and the loss of all things, that he might keep unbroken his loyalty to his reason and his conscience. We should remember him with respect; remembering at the same time that had his heresy prevailed the Christian religion—as Carlyle said—would have been degraded to a legend.

The death of Arius was followed by the death of Constantine. In his last hours the emperor off his robe of imperial purple, and was attired in the white garments which were worn by those about to be baptized, and was admitted at last into the membership of the church over which he had so long presided as the bishop of the bishops. In Rome his monument was set among the statues of the divine emperors with the ceremonies of the old religion, but in Constantinople he was buried by the Christians, and about his tomb stood the twelve pillars which symbolized the twelve apostles.

The second campaign in the contention between the Athanasians and the Arians extended to the death of Constantine's son, the emperor Constantius, in 361. It was a time of theological discussion.

During this period no less than twelve councils of bishops were convened, until the pagans complained that the Christians had ruined the postal service by using the horses to convey them to the synods. Some of these meetings were held in the East, some in the West, some in the East and in the West at the same time, the different parties holding separate sessions. The East and the West took temperamentally characteristic positions: the speculative East eager to discuss the Nicene Creed and to amend it, the practical West content for the most part to take it as it stood.

Almost every council made its own creed. There appeared four creeds at Antioch, in the main orthodox but declining to use the test word homoousios. There appeared four creeds of Sirmium, departing farther and farther from the orthodoxy of Nicæa. The second creed of Sirmium was signed by Hosius, the veteran of the Nicene Council, now an aged and broken man. The creed of Ariminum (Rimini), dictated to the council by Arian leaders with whom the fathers conferred at Nice in Thrace, was signed by Liberius, bishop of Rome. "The whole world," said Jerome, "groaned, and was amazed to find itself Arian."

But Constantius failed to overcome Athanasius. At first he had recalled him from his banishment in Gaul, only to send him again into banishment in Rome. From Rome he was recalled, and the day of his return to Alexandria was long remembered as the festival "when the Pope Athanasius came home." The people thronged the streets to meet him with palm branches and fireworks. For five years he administered his diocese, and wrote letters and sermons and books in explanation and defence of the Nicene Creed.

Then finding that neither the imperial favor nor the imperial disfavor moved him, Constantius drove the bishop out of Alexandria with soldiers. He made his way into the Nitrian deserts, among the monks and hermits, where he spent six years in hiding. The world seemed to be against him, and he alone against the world. The state was Arian; the church was Arian. Everywhere the bishops were setting their signatures to Arian creeds. He was in the exceedingly difficult position of one who finds himself in disagreement with the church, and yet knows that the truth which he maintains is the truth of God. Shall he go out? Shall he say, "My understanding of the creed is disallowed by the majority of my brethren; on all sides the bishops are against me; I must resign my place"? Happily not. Athanasius believed that the church exists not for the maintenance of any position theological or ecclesiastical, but solely for the maintenance of the truth. Whatever is true, is of the essence of the church. Whatever is false, though it may be reiterated by endless councils, and confirmed by excommunication and anathema, is nevertheless nothing at all but heresy and schism and a lie, to be opposed by every honest man; to be opposed for the sake of the church as well as for the sake of the truth, and within the church.

The third campaign in the Arian war began with the accession of Julian and ended with the death of Valens.

Julian, abandoning the religion which seemed to him a hopeless tangle of controversy and endeavoring to restore the paganism of the great days of Rome, brought back all the exiled bishops, hoping that the Christians being left to fight their quarrels out with no restraint would so destroy the church that it would disappear like a bad dream. But when Julian's brief reign ended in defeat, it was the Arians in whom his hostile expectations were fulfilled. They were divided by the bitter discussions in the councils. All their initial differences were magnified. There appeared now not only Arians, but conservative Arians and radical Arians. Many who had been in sympathy with the Arian ideas were weary of the Arian debates. Many were scandalized by the spectacle of conventions of bishops set upon by Arian soldiers and compelled to sign their names to Arian creeds.

When Valens came to the throne he increased the confusion by taking the side of one Arian party against another. Thus they fought among themselves as Julian had devoutly hoped they would. In 378, when Valens fell at the battle of Adrianople, in his war against the Goths, Arianism as an organized party in the church came practically to an end.

By this time Athanasius had come to the end of his life of long contention, seeing victory and peace afar off, yet not entering himself into the new era. At the council held in Alexandria in 362, he made notable contribution both to the theology and to the religion of the debating Christians. He discussed the words which were in use in the controversy and showed how a great part of the contention was due to a failure to define the terms. What we anti-Arians mean, he said, is this and this; and the more reasonable of is opponents found themselves in substantial agreement with him, after all. The result was the formation of a "New Nicene" party which was able to commend its theological position to the general Christian mind. The difficulty throughout had been the danger, on the one side, of a doctrine which recognized a superior god and one or two inferior gods, and, on the other side, of a doctrine which recognized in the "Son" and the "Holy Spirit" only names to distinguish functions or activities of God the Father. The church was in peril of shipwreck between the Scylla of Arianism and the Charybdis of Sabellianism. What they did under the leadership of Athanasius at he Council of Alexandria was to state the difference between ousia  and hypostasis: hypostasis  signifying a distinction of being, roughly and inadequately translated out of the Latin into English by the word person;  ousia  signifying a common essence or being, translated out of Latin into English by the word substance. We believe, they said, in one ousia and three hypostases, in one substance and three persons. This, said Gregory of Nazianzus, was more honorable and important and profitable than all the books which Athanasius wrote.

The Athanasian Creed is so called because of its expression of Athanasian orthodoxy. It was composed in the middle of the fifth century, probably in Lerins in Gaul, and shows the influence of the theological teachings of Augustine.