amused themselves with theatrical representations of the contest on the stage—­the point of their burlesques being the equality of age of the Father and his Son” (Ibid, p. 53).  Gibbon quotes an amusing passage to show how widely spread was the interest in the subject debated between the rival parties:  “This city is full of mechanics and slaves, who are all of them profound theologians, and preach in the shops and in the streets.  If you desire a man to change a piece of silver, he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father; if you ask the price of a loaf, you are told, by way of reply, that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you inquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is, that the Son was made out of nothing” (Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall,” vol. iii. p. 402).  Arius maintained that “the Logos was a dependent and spontaneous production, created from nothing by the will of the Father.  The Son, by whom all things were made, had been begotten before all worlds, and the longest of the astronomical periods could be compared only as a fleeting moment to the extent of his duration; yet this duration was not infinite, and there had been a time which preceded the ineffable generation of the Logos....  He governed the universe in obedience to the will of his Father and Monarch” (Ibid, pp. 18,19).  The “Nicene creed” of the Prayer-book consists of the creed promulgated by the Council of Nice, with the anathema at the end omitted, and with the addition of some phrases joined to it at the Council at Constantinople, and the insertion of the Filioque.  At the Council of Nice, Arius was condemned and banished, to the triumph of his great opponent, Athanasius; but he was recalled in A.D. 330, obtained the banishment of Athanasius in A.D. 335, and died suddenly, under very suspicious circumstances, in A.D. 336.  Throughout this century the struggle proceeded furiously, each party in turn getting the upper hand, as the emperor of the time inclined towards Catholicism or towards Arianism, and each persecuting the adherents of the other.  Among Arian subdivisions we find Semi-Arians, Eusebians, Aetians, Eunomians, Acasians, Psathyrians, etc.  Then we have the Apollinarians, who maintained that Christ had no human soul, the divinity supplying its place; the Marcellians, who taught that a divine emanation descended on Christ.  Allied to the Manichaean heresy were the Priscillians, the Saccophori, the Solitaries, and many others; and, in addition, the Messalians or Euchites, the Luciferians, the Origenists, the Antidicomarianites, and the Collyridians.  A quarrel about the consecration of a bishop gave rise to fierce struggles not connected with the doctrine, so much as with the discipline of the Church.  The Bishops of Numidia were angered by not having been called to the consecration of Caecilianus Bishop of Carthage, and, assembling together, they elected and consecrated a rival bishop to that see, and declared Caecilianus incompetent for the episcopal office.