Page:Early Christianity outside the Roman empire.djvu/18

Rh and Hilary, and that Church came to Nicaea and proceeded to Chalcedon. After all, the Creeds are merely the formal ratification of the best theology of the great Churchmen. The new Constitution was, in fact, inevitable—like the promulgation of the Pope's Infallibility at a later day, long after the dogma had been a pious inference in the Roman communion.

This may indeed be so, and I for one should be very willing to believe that the rigidity of the later Church was indispensable for it to withstand the shock of the Barbarian invasions which swept away the ancient Civilisation. But the object that I have chiefly had in view in these Lectures is to glance at a strangely neglected branch of the Church, a branch in full communion and fellowship with the rest of the Christian body and proud of its Apostolic descent, yet cut off by political and linguistic circumstances from that struggle with Greek philosophy which so greatly influenced the Christianity of the Greek-speaking populations within the Roman Empire.