Page:The Last Judgement and Second Coming of the Lord Illustrated.djvu/254

 at Nice, a city in Bithynia. This took place in the year 324; they were required to deliberate on and determine the doctrine which the Church ought to accept concerning God. Three hundred and eighteen bishops assembled, and Constantine himself acted as the moderator of the meeting; they determined, by a majority of votes (296 to 22, according to Philustorgius), that there are three persons constituting the one God, as that idea has been expressed in the Nicene creed originally drawn up by Hosius of Corduba, and also in that which bears the name of Athanasius.

That council then, as the creeds declare, separated the Divinity into three persons, and the Lord and Saviour into two; they passed by Jesus Christ as the supreme head of the Church, and taught men to look up to God the Father, as to another person, with merely the mention of Christ's name upon their tongues as an inducement for the Father to have mercy upon them. Hereby the head of the Church was removed from its body, the door of the temple was taken off its hinges, and an attempt was made to enter into the sheepfold by some other way than by Him who had declared Himself to be "the Way, the Truth, and the Life."

From this time an incredible number of heresies came forth, and the head of antichrist was displayed. This was the necessary consequence of not immediately approaching the Lord Jesus Christ as the sole God of His Church. The council adverted to declared, by its anthority and creeds, that the Church has three heads, and that these deliberate together concerning who shall be saved, and the means for doing it! By this all spiritual perception about theological truth has been overshadowed as with a dense cloud; reason has been renounced, as a thing not to enter into the precincts of this doctrine; fallacies have been invented to