Athanasius and Hilary can never have met face to face. But the eyes and the agents of Athanasius were everywhere, and he must have known something of the exile and of the services of Hilary, who was, of course, well acquainted with the history of Athanasius, though, with the rest of Gaul, he may not have been whole-hearted in his defence. And now he was the more likely to be drawn towards him because this was the time of his approximation to the younger generation of the Conservative School. For it is with them that Hilary’s affinities are closest and most obvious. The great Cappadocians were devoted Origenists—we know the service they rendered to their master by the publication of the Philocalia,—and there could be no stronger bond of union between Hilary and themselves. They were the outgrowth of that great Asiatic school to which the name of Semiarians, somewhat unkindly given by Epiphanius, has clung, and which was steadily increasing in influence over the thought of Asia, the dominant province, at this time, of the whole Empire. Gregory of Nazianzus, the eldest of the three great writers, was probably not more than twenty-five years of age when Hilary was sent into exile, and none of them can have seriously affected even his latest works. But they represented, in a more perfect form, the teaching of the best men of the Conservative School; and when we find that Hilary, who was old enough to be the father of Basil and the two Gregories, has thoughts in common with them which are not to be found in Athanasius, we may safely assign this peculiar teaching to the influence upon Hilary, predisposed by his loyalty to Origen to listen to the representatives of the Origenist tradition, of this school of theology. We see one side of this influence in Hilary’s understatement of the doctrine of the Holy Ghost. The Semiarians were coming to be of one mind with the Nicenes as to the consubstantial Deity of the Son; none of them, in all probability, at this time would have admitted the consubstantial Deity of the Spirit, and the unity of their School was to be wrecked in future years upon this point. The fact that Hilary could use language so reserved upon this subject must have led them to welcome his alliance the more heartily. Neither he nor they could foresee the future of the doctrine, and both sides must have sincerely thought that they were at one. And, indeed, on Hilary’s part there was a great willingness to believe in this unity, which led him, as we shall see, into an unfortunate attempt at ecclesiastical diplomacy. Another evidence of contact with this Eastern School, but at its most advanced point, is the remarkable expression, ‘Only-begotten God,’ which Hilary ‘employs with startling freedom, evidently as the natural expression of his own inmost thought Hort, Two Dissertations, p. 27..’ Dr. Hort, whose words these are, states that the term is used by Athanasius only twice, once in youth and once in old age; but that, on the other hand, it is familiar to two of the Cappadocians, Basil and Gregory of Nyssa. They must have learned it from some Asiatic writer known to Hilary as a contemporary, to them as successors. And when we find Hilary Trin. viii. 40. rejecting the baptism of heretics, and so putting himself in opposition to what had been the Roman view for a century and that of Gaul since the Council of Arles in 314, and then find this opinion echoed by Gregory of Nazianzus Cf. Gwatkin, Studies of Arianism, p. 130., we are reminded not only of Hilary’s general independence of thought, but of the circumstance that St. Cyprian found his stoutest ally in contesting this same point in the Cappadocian Firmilian. A comparison of the two sets of writings would probably lead to the discovery of more coincidences than have yet been noticed; of the fact itself, of ‘the Semiarian influence so visible in the De Synodis of Hilary, and even in his own later work Ib., p. 159. It would not be fair to judge Hilary by the de Synodis alone. The would-be diplomatist, in his eagerness to bring about a reconciliation, is not quite just either to the facts or to his own feelings.,’ there can be no doubt.