Page:The age of Justinian and Theodora (Volume 1).djvu/301

 succession of haughty prelates who equalled the magnificence and exceeded the arrogance of kings.

From the day of its birth almost to the present hour the Church has been agitated by internal dissensions generated by the efforts of reason to understand and to define those inscrutable mysteries, to a belief in which every supernatural religion must owe its existence. The primitive religion of the ancients was a natural growth, accepted insensibly during a state of savagery and maintained politically long after it had been repudiated by philosophy, but Christianity was offered to a world already advanced in civilization, and had to pass through a process of intellectual digestion before it could take its place as an unassailable national belief. The Church, before it stands clearly revealed in the light of history, had been inspired with the conception of a Trinity by a contemplation of the Platonic philosophy; and the problem as to how this doctrine could be expounded as not inconsistent with monotheism occasioned the first of those great councils called Oecumenical. It met in 325 at Nicaea. St. Martin of Tours (c. 370) was waited on at table by the Empress; he handed the cup to his chaplain, thus giving him precedence over the Emperor; Sulp. Severus, Vita St. M., 20; Dial., ii, 6. See further Gieseler, op. cit., i, 91.]