To the Goths themselves the change must have seemed not only
unimportant, but imperceptible. Unaccustomed to that accuracy of
thought, which is too often sneered at by Gibbon as 'metaphysical
subtlety,' all of which they would have been aware was the change of
a few letters in a creed written in an unknown tongue. They could
not know, (Ulfilas himself could not have known, only two years after
the death of St. Athanasius at Alexandria; while the Nicaean Creed
was as yet received by only half of the Empire; and while he
meanwhile had been toiling for years in the Danubian wilds, ignorant
perhaps of the controversy which had meanwhile convulsed the Church)-
-neither the Goths nor he, I say, could have known that the Arianism,
which they embraced, was really the last, and as it were apologetic,
refuge of dying Polytheism; that it, and not the Catholic Faith,
denied the abysmal unity of the Godhead; that by making the Son
inferior to the Father, as touching his Godhead, it invented two
Gods, a greater and a lesser, thus denying the absoluteness, the
infinity, the illimitability, by any category of quantity, of that
One Eternal, of whom it is written, that God is a Spirit. Still less
could they have guessed that when Arius, the handsome popular
preacher (whose very name, perhaps, Ulfilas never heard) asked the
fine ladies of Alexandria--'Had you a son before that son was born?'-
-'No.' 'Then God could have no son before that son was begotten,
&c.'--that he was mingling up the idea of Time with the idea of that
Eternal God who created Time, and debasing to the accidents of before
and after that Timeless and Eternal Generation, of which it is
written, 'Thou art my Son, this day have I begotten thee.' Still
less could Ulfilas, or his Goths, have known, that the natural human
tendency to condition God by Time, would be, in later ages, even long
after Arianism was crushed utterly, the parent of many a cruel,