Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/70

44 idea of a Mediator, of an actual personal Redeemer of the world revealed in the gospel, au idea that was becoming swamped in metaphysical conceptions of the Godhead.

3. The origin of Christ by creation. According to Arius, the sonship of Christ was only a figurative conception. God could not really have a Son begotten of His own nature. Christ must have been made, created out of nothing, and that by the will of God. He was made before all other creatures; and the difference between His origin and that of the rest of the universe was that He was created directly by God, while all other existences that came into being were created through Him.

4. He had no human soul. The exalted being Christ came down and was incarnate in a human body; that was all. Thus the problem of the nature of Christ was simplified. There was no complexity of a double consciousness.

5. Christ was naturally mutable. He could turn to evil, if He so chose.

6. A somewhat inconsistent part of the system was the contention that Christ received Divine honours in recognition of His worthy conduct. At this point Arianism is linked on to. It is not easy to harmonise such a conception with Arius's idea of the pre-existing Christ; but the reconciliation is sought in the Divine foreknowledge. God foresaw how Christ would conduct Himself and rewarded Him accordingly by anticipation.

Arianism was an extremely simple system; herein was its recommendation. It professed to be free from the obscurities of the popular theology. It banished mystery from religion. Its appeal was to logic. Further, it claimed to be conservative, falling back on the verbal sense of Scripture against the speculative elaborations of metaphysical theology; but its range of scriptural authority was small, a mere group of texts arbitrarily selected and in some cases wilfully misapplied. In this matter both parties were almost equally guilty of offending against sound principles of textual exegesis.