of Arianism would have resolved Christianity into cosmology and formal ethics.  It would have destroyed it as religion.  Yet the perverse situation into which the long and fierce controversy had drifted cannot be better illustrated than by one undisputed fact.  Athanasius, who assured for Christianity its character as a religion of the living communion of God with man, is yet the theologian in whose Christology almost every possible trace of the recollection of the historic Jesus has disappeared.  The purpose of the redemption is to bring men into community of life with God.  But Athanasius apprehended this redemption as a conferment, from without and from above, of a divine nature.  He subordinated everything to this idea.  The whole narrative concerning Jesus falls under the interpretation that the only quality requisite for the Redeemer in his work was the possession in all fulness of the divine nature.  His incarnation, his manifestation in real human life, held fast to in word, is reduced to a mere semblance.  Salvation is not an ethical process, but a miraculous endowment.  The Christ, who was God, lifts men up to godhood.  They become God.  These phrases are of course capable of ethical and intelligible meaning.  The development of the doctrine, however, threw the emphasis upon the metaphysical and miraculous aspects of the work.  It gloried in the fact that the presence of divine and human, two natures in one person forever, was unintelligible.  In the end it came to pass that the enthusiastic assent to that which defied explanation became the very mark of a humble and submissive faith.  One reads the so-called Athanasian Creed, and hears the ring of its determination to exact assent.  It had long since been clear to these Catholics and churchmen that, with the mere authority of Scripture, it was not possible to defend Christianity against the heretics.  The heresies read their heresies out of the Bible.  The orthodox read orthodoxy from the same page.  Marcion had proved that, in the very days when the canon took its shape.  There must be an authority to define the interpretation of the Scripture.  Those who would share the benefits which the Church dispensed must assent unconditionally to the terms of membership.

All these questions were veiled for the early Christians behind the question of the kind of Christ in whom their hearts believed.  With all that we have said about the reprehensible admixture of the metaphysical element in the dogma, with all the accusation which we bring concerning acute or gradual Hellenisation, secularisation and defection from the Christ, we ought not to hide from ourselves that in this gigantic struggle there were real religious interests at stake, and that for the men of both parties.  Dimly, or perhaps vividly, the man of either party felt that the conception of the Christ which he was fighting for was congruous with the conception of religion which he had, or felt that he must have.  It is this religious issue,