But, notwithstanding this unity, there is a true numerical duality of Person. Sabellius, we must remember, had held for two generations the pre-eminence among heretics. To the Greek-speaking world outside Egypt the error which he and Paul of Samosata had taught, that God is one Person, was still the most dangerous of falsehoods; the supreme victory of truth had not been won in their eyes when Arius was condemned at Nicæa, but when Paul was deposed at Antioch. The Nicene leaders had certainly counted the cost when they adopted as the test of orthodoxy the same word which Paul had used for the inculcation of error. But the homoousion, however great its value as a permanent safeguard of truth, was the immediate cause of alienation and suspicion. And not only did it make the East misunderstand the West, but it furnished the Arians with the most effective of instruments for widening the breach between the two forces opposed to them. They had an excuse for calling their opponents in Egypt and the West by the name of Sabellians, the very name most likely to engender distrust in Asia Cf. Sulp Sev., Chron. ii. 42 for the Eastern suspicion that the West held a trionyma unio;—one Person under three names. Sulpicius ascribes it to Arian slander, but its causes lay deeper than this.. Hilary, who could enter with sympathy into the Eastern mind and had learnt from his own treatment at Seleucia how strong the feeling was, labours with untiring patience to dissipate the prejudice. There is no Arian plea against which he argues at greater length. The names ‘Father’ and ‘Son,’ being parts of the revelation, are convincing proofs of distinction of Person as well as of unity of nature. They prove that the nature is the same, but possessed after a different manner by Each of the Two; by the One as ingenerate, by the Other as begotten. The word ‘Image,’ also a part of the revelation, is another proof of the distinction; an object and its reflection in a mirror are obviously not one thing. Again, the distinct existence of the Son is proved by the fact that He has free volition of His own; and by a multitude of passages of Scripture, many of them absolutely convincing, as for instance, those from the Gospel of St John. But these two Persons, though one in nature, are not equal in dignity. The Father is greater than the Son; greater not merely as compared to the incarnate Christ, but as compared to the Son, begotten from eternity. This is not simply by the prerogative inherent in all paternity; it is because the Father is self-existent, Himself the Source of all being This was the doctrine of all the earlier theologians, soon to be displaced in the stress of controversy by the opinion that the inferiority concerns the Son only as united with man. See the citations in Westcott’s Gospel of St. John, additional note to xiv. 28.. With one of His happy phrases Hilary describes it as an inferiority generatione, non genere Tr. in Ps. cxxxviii. 17.; the Son is one in kind or nature with the Father, though inferior, as the Begotten, to the Unbegotten. But this inferiority is not to be so construed as to lessen our belief in His divine attributes. For instance, when He addresses the Father in prayer, this is not because He is subordinate, but because He wishes to honour the Fatherhood Ib. cxli. 6.; and, as Hilary argues at great length Trin. xi. 21 ff., on 1 Cor. xv, 21 ff., the end, when God shall be all in all, is not to be regarded as a surrender of the Son’s power, in the sense of loss. It is a mysterious final state of permanent, willing submission to the Father’s will, into which He enters by the supreme expression of an obedience which has never failed. Again, our Lord’s language in St. Mark xiii. 32, must not be taken as signifying ignorance on the part of the Son of His Father’s purpose. For, according to St. Paul (Col. ii. 3), in Him are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge, and therefore He must know the day and hour of judgment. He is ignorant relatively to us, in the sense that He will not betray His Father’s secret Trin. ix. 58 ff.. Whether or no it be possible in calmer times to maintain that the knowledge and the ignorance are complementary truths which finite minds cannot reconcile, we cannot wonder that Hilary, ever on the watch against apparent concessions to Arianism, should in this instance have abandoned his usual method of balancing against each other the apparent contraries. His reasoning is, in any case, a striking proof of his intense conviction of the co-equal Godhead of the Son.