they strove to purify, and the miraculous presence, errorless precept,
and loving promises of their Lord were alike undoubted, alike rejoiced
in, by every nation that heard the word of Apostles. The Pelagian's
assertion that immortality could be won by man's will, and the
Arian's that Christ possessed no more than man's nature, never for
an instant--or in any country--hindered the advance of the moral law
and intellectual hope of Christianity. Far the contrary; the British
heresy concerning Free Will, though it brought bishop after bishop
into England to extinguish it, remained an extremely healthy and
active element in the British mind down to the days of John Bunyan
and the guide Great Heart, and the calmly Christian justice and simple
human virtue of Theodoric were the very roots and first burgeons
of the regeneration of Italy.[1] But of the degrees in which it was
possible for any barbarous nation to receive during the first five
centuries, either the spiritual power of Christianity itself, or
the instruction in classic art and science which accompanied it, you
cannot rightly judge, without taking the pains, and they will not, I
think, be irksome, of noticing carefully, and fixing permanently in
your minds, the separating characteristics of the greater races, both
in those who learned and those who taught.

[Footnote 1: Gibbon, in his 37th chapter, makes Ulphilas also an
Arian, but might have forborne, with grace, his own definition of
orthodoxy:--and you are to observe generally that at this time the
teachers who admitted the inferiority of Christ to the Father as
touching his Manhood, were often counted among Arians, but quite
falsely. Christ's own words, "My Father is greater than I," end that
controversy at once. Arianism consists not in asserting the subjection
of the Son to the Father, but in denying the subjected Divinity.]