ON reading the history of Arianism the question naturally suggests itself how it came to start into existence so suddenly and to spread with such rapidity. And a sadder reflection occurs to the Catholic student, as if the Christian body, so long and variously tried by persecution, deserved or promised better, than that its new prosperity should be marred by so deadly a heresy, and that, in every part of the orbis terrarum, conterminously with the Church herself. It was not so with other heresies; Sabellianism, Novatianism, and Pelagianism were at least as plausible systems of doctrine, and had as able teachers; but they had no great historical career, as Arianism had. In “The Arians of the Fourth Century”