Page:The Greek and Eastern churches.djvu/74

48 it necessary to rebuke the faults of the Church in order to prevent it from ruining its own cause. One might have thought that the Christians would have blushed for shame to have brought down upon their heads the moral disapproval of a convert. But that would be viewing the case from the emperor's point of view. To Alexander and his friends it would appear in a very different light. Constantine wrote a letter to Alexander urging a settlement of the dispute, on the calm assumption that the ground of it was quite trivial, and treating the bishops concerned almost as though they were a group of quarrelling schoolboys. Thus he says in the course of his letter: "For the cause of your difference has not been any of the leading doctrines or precepts of the Divine law, nor has any new heresy respecting the worship of God arisen among you. You are in truth of one and the same judgment; you may therefore well join in communion and fellowship. For as long as you continue to contend about these small and very insignificant questions, it is not fitting that so large a portion of God's people should be under the direction of your judgment, since you are thus divided between yourselves." In reading such words we do not know whether to admire most the amazing arrogance that presumes to attempt the settlement of religious difference by a message of imperial authority, or the sublime simplicity that is totally incapable of perceiving the gravity of the question at issue or the depth of the fissure in the Church that it is producing. Not a "new heresy"—"one and the same judgment"—"small and very insignificant questions"—these are phrases that indicate total incapacity to grasp the actual issues of the dispute. The letter is a living, characteristic document, in every paragraph revealing its writer as the man of the world who would brush aside the most serious theological discussions as mere hair-splitting, but also the earnest, practical statesman who is anxious to