Page:Syrian Churches (Etheridge).djvu/39

Rh Heathen, named Autolycus. He governed the church nine years.

, 190, is celebrated for his energetic opposition to the progress of Montanism. In his time the controversy began respecting the time of keeping Easter.

, 249, in whose days Berylus, a bishop of an Arabian diocese, invented the doctrine, that our Saviour, before the incarnation, had not subsisted in a personality distinct from that of the Father; and, that it was the person of the Father who dwelt in Jesus after his birth from the holy Virgin. A council was held at Antioch on this matter, the acts of which subsisted in the time of Eusebius. Origen, who had come from Egypt, convinced Berylus of his error, and constrained him to retract it. Babylas died in the persecution under Decius. He was a bishop of great and deserved reputation, and is the subject of an elaborate eulogy by Chrysostom.

, a native of Samosata on the Euphrates: a man of corrupt life, proud and turbulent in disposition, and heretical in doctrine. Respecting the Godhead, he taught that the Word and Holy Spirit were in the Father, not having a really personal subsistence, but merely as the faculty of reason is in a man: so that there are not three persons, but one only, in the Divinity. His views of the person of Christ were, therefore, necessarily unworthy. He held him, indeed, to be purely a man, and to be called the Son of God only in a manner similar to that by which we give to a mansion the name of him who built it. According to him, the Lord Jesus Christ was illuminated by the divine wisdom, which was in him by habitation and operation, but not by any kind of personal union. All the sentiments of Paul of Samosata tended to Judaism; and, according to some of the fathers, were