theory, though some Arians came very near it), his virtue is, like our
own, a constant struggle of free-will, not the fixed habit which is the
perfection and annulment of free-will. And now that his human soul is
useless, we may as well simplify the incarnation into an assumption of
human flesh and nothing more. The Holy Spirit bears to the Son a
relation not unlike that of the Son to the Father. Thus the Arian
trinity of divine persons forms a descending series, separated by
infinite degrees of honour and glory, resembling the philosophical triad
of orders of spiritual existence, extending outwards in concentric
circles.

[Sidenote: Criticism of it.]

Indeed the system is heathen to the core. The Arian Christ is nothing
but a heathen idol invented to maintain a heathenish Supreme in heathen
isolation from the world. Never was a more illogical theory devised by
the wit of man. Arius proclaims a God of mystery, unfathomable to the
Son of God himself, and goes on to argue as if the divine generation
were no more mysterious than its human type. He forgets first that
metaphor would cease to be metaphor if there were nothing beyond it;
then that it would cease to be true if its main idea were misleading. He
presses the metaphor of sonship as if mere human relations could exhaust
the meaning of the divine; and soon works round to the conclusion that
it is no proper sonship at all. In his irreverent hands the Lord's deity
is but the common right of mankind, his eternity no more than the beasts
themselves may claim. His clumsy logic overturns every doctrine he is
endeavouring to establish. He upholds the Lord's divinity by making the
Son of God a creature, and then worships him to escape the reproach of
heathenism, although such worship, on his own showing, is mere idolatry.
He makes the Lord's manhood his primary fact, and overthrows that too by