need to be purified after death, if they are to excape condemnation on the Day of Judgment. Even the Mother of our Lord needs the purification of pain; this is the sword which should pierce through her soul. All who are infected by sin, the heretic who has erred in ignorance among them, must pass through cleansing fires after death. Then comes the general Resurrection. To the good it brings the final change to perfect glory; te bad will rise only to return to their former place 1. The multitude of men will be judged, and after the education and purification of suffering to which, by God's mercy, they have been submitted, will be accepted by Him. Hilary's writings contain no hint that any who are allowed to present themselves on the Day of Judgment will then be rejected. We have now completed the survey of Hilary's thoughts. Many of these were strange and new to his contemporaries, and his originality, we may be sure, deprived him of some of the influence he wished to exert in the controversies of his day. Yet he shared the spirit and entered heartily into the interests and conflicts of his age, and therefore his thoughts in many ways were different from our own. To this we owe, no doubt, the preservation of his works; writings which anticipated modern opinion would have been powerless for good in that day, and would not have survived to ours. Thus from his own century to ours Hilary has been somewhat isolated and neglected, and even misunderstood. Yet he is one of the most notable figures in the history of the early Church, and must be numbered among those who have done most to make Christian thought richer and more exact. If we would appreciate him aright as one of the builders of the dogmatic structure of the Faith, we must omit from the materials of our estimate a great part of his writings, and a part which has had a wider influence than any other. His interpretation of the letter, though not of the spirit, of Scripture must be dismissed; interesting as it always is, and often suggestive, it was not his own and was a hindrance, though he did not see it, to the freedom of his thought. Yet his exegesis in detail is often admirable. For instance, it would not be easy to overpraise his insight and courage in resisting the conventional orthodoxy, sanctioned by Athanasius in his own generation and by Augustine in the next, which interpreted St. Paul's First-born of every creature' as signifying the Incarnation of Christ, and not His eternal generation. We must omit also much that Hilary borrowed without question from current opinion; it is his glory that he concentrated his attention upon some few questions of supreme importance, and his strength, not his weakness, that he was ready to adopt in other matters the best and wisest judgments to which he had access. An intelligent, and perhaps ineffective, curiosity may keep itself abreast of the thought of the time, to quote a popular phrase; Hilary was content to survey wide regions of doctrine and discipline with the eyes of Origen and of Cyprian. This limitation of the interests of a powerful mind has enabled him to penetrate further into the mysteries of the Faith than any of his predecessors; to points, in fact, where his successors have failed to establish themselves. We cannot blame him that later theologians, starting where he left off, have in some directions advanced further still. The writings of Hilary are the quarry whence many of the best thoughts of Ambrose and of Leo are hewn. Eminent and successful as these men were, we cannot rank them with Hilary as intellectually his equals; we may even wonder how many of their conclusions they would have drawn had not Hilary supplied the premisses. It is a greater honour that the unrivalled genius of Augustine is deeply indebted to him. Nor may we blame him, save lightly, for some rashness and error in his speculations. He set out, unwillingly, as we know, but not half-heartedly, upon his novel journey of exploration. He had not, as we have, centuries of criticism behind him, and could not know that some of the 9 Trin. vi. 3. 8 Tr. in Ps. cxviii., Gimel, 12. avenues he followed would lead him astray. It may be that we are sober because we are, in a sense, disillusioned; that modern Christian thought which starts from the old premisses tends to excess of circumspection. And certainly Hilary would not have earned. his fame as one of the most original and profound of teachers, whose view of Christology is one of the most interesting in the whole of Christian antiquity 3, had he not been inspired by a sense of freedom and of hope in his quest. Yet great as was his genius and reverent the spirit in which he worked, the errors into which he fell, though few, were serious. There are instances in which he neglects his habitual balancing of corresponding infinities; as when he shuts his eyes to half the revelation, and asserts that Christ could not be ignorant and could not feel pain. And there is that whole system of dispensations which he has built up in explanation of Christ's life on earth; a system against which our conscience and our common sense rebel, for it contradicts the plain words of Scripture and attributes to God 'a process of Divine reserve which is in fact deception 4.' We may compare Hilary's method in such cases to the architecture of Gloucester and of Sherborne, where the ingenuity of a later age has connected and adorned the massive and isolated columns of Norman date by its own light and graceful drapery of stonework. We cannot but admire the result; yet there is a certain concealment of the original design, and perhaps a perilous cutting away of the solid structure. But, in justice to Hilary, we must remember that in these speculations he is venturing away from the established standards of doctrine. When he is enunciating revealed truths, or arguing onward from them to conclusions towards which they point, he has the company of the Creeds, or at least they indicate the way he must go. But in explaining the connection between doctrine and doctrine he is left to his own guidance. It is as though a traveller, not content to acquaint himself with the highroads, should make his way over hedge and ditch from one of them to another; he will not always hit upon the best and straightest course. But at least Hilary's conclusions, though sometimes erroneous, were reached by honest and reverent reasoning, and neither ancient nor modern theology can afford to reproach him. The tendency of the former, especially ofter the rise of Nestorius, was to exaggerate some of his errors; and the latter has failed to develope and enforce some of his highest teaching. This is, indeed, worthy of all admiration. On the moral side of Christianity we see him insisting upon the voluntary character of Christ's work; upon His acts of will, which are a satisfaction to God and an appeal to us 5. On the intellectual side we find the Unity in Trinity so luminously declared that Bishop French of Lahore, one of the greatest of missionaries, had the works of Hilary constantly in his hands, and contemplated a translation of the De Trinitate into Arabic for the benefit of Mohammedans. This was not because Hilary's explanation of our Lord's sufferings might seem to commend the Gospel to their prejudices; such a concession would have been repugnant to French's whole mode of thought. It was because in the central argument on behalf of the Godhead of Christ, where he had least scope for originality of thought, Hilary has never suffered himself to become a mere mechanical compiler. 3 Dorner, I. ii. 300. 4 Gore, Dissertas, p. 151. The light which he has cast upon his sub closer definition of this sacrifice that is inaccurate. ... Hilary lays especial stress upon the freedom of the Lord's acceptance of death.' He quotes Trin. x. 11. 5 Schwane, ii. 27. avs, Though we reject that part of it which attributes a atir impassibility to the body of Christ, 6 He had evidently been long familiar with it (Life, i. 155), yet Hilary's exposito prosents one truth more clearly than the but the first mention of its use for miss onary purposes is in 1862 earlier Fathers had stated it, by giving to the doctrine of the (ib. i. 137). He began the translation into Arabic at Tunis in representative satisfa ton of Christ its reasonable explanation as 1890, after his resignation of the bishopric of Lahore (ii. 333), a free service of satisfaction. He conceives rightly of the Lord's but it seems doubtful whether he was able to make any progress whole life on earth. with all its troubles and infirmities, as a with it at Muscat. His biographer says nothing of the amount sacrifice of free love on the part of the God-Man; it is only his actually accomplished. ject, though clear, is never hard; and the doctrine which, because it was attractive to himself, he has made attractive to his readers, is that of the unity of God, the very doctrine which is of supreme importance in Mohammedan eyes 7. But, above all, it is Hilary's doctrine concerning the Incarnation as the eternal purpose of God for the union of the creature with the Creator, that must excite our interest and awaken our thoughts. He renders it, on the one hand, impossible to rate too highly the dignity of man, created to share the nature and the life of God; impossible, on the other hand, to estimate highly enough the condescension of Christ in assuming humanity. It is by His humiliation that we are saved; by the fact that the nature of man was taken by his Maker, not by the fact that Christ, being man, remained sinless. For sin began against God's will and after His counsel was formed; it might deflect the march of His purpose towards fulfilment, but could no more impede its consummation than it could cause its inception. The true salvation of man is not that which rescues him, when corrupt, from sin and its consequences, but that which raises him, corruptible, because free, even though he had not become corrupt, into the safety of union with the nature of God. Human life, though pure from actual sin, would have been aimless and hopeless without the Incarnation. And the human body would have had no glory, for its glory is that Christ has taken it, worn it awhile in its imperfect state, laid it aside and finally resumed it in its perfection. All this He must have done, in accordance with God's purpose, even though the Fall had never occurred. Hence the Incarnation and the Resurrection are the facts of paramount interest; the death of Christ, corresponding as it does to the hypothetical laying aside of the unglorified flesh, loses something of its usual prominence in Christian thought. It is represented as being primarily for Christ the moment of transition, for the Christian the act which enables him to profit by the Incarnation; but it is the Incarnation itself whereby, in Hilary's words, we are saved into the nature and the name of God. But though we may feel that this great truth is not stated in its full impressiveness, we must allow that the thought which has taken the foremost place is no mere academic speculation. And, after all, sin and the Atonement are copiously treated in his writings, though they do not control his exposition of the Incarnation. Yet even in this there are large spaces of his argument where these considerations have a place, though only to give local colour, so to speak, and a sense of reality to the description of a purpose formed and a work done for man because he is man, not because he is fallen. But if Hilary has somewhat erred in placing the Cross in the background, he is not in error in magnifying the scope of the reconciliation which includes it as in a wider horizon. Man has in Christ the nature of God; the infinite Mind is intelligible to the finite. The Creeds are no dry statement of facts which do not touch our life; the truths they contain are the revelation of God's self to us. Not for the pleasure of weaving theories, but in the interests of practical piety, Hilary has fused belief and conduct into the unity of that knowledge which Isaiah foresaw and St. John possessed; the knowledge which is not a means towards life, but life itself. 7 For Bishop French's view of the importance of this doctrine, see his Life, i. 84. 20. The reconciliation of mankind implies 'a restitution to a state from which they had fallen, or which was potentially theirs, or 8 Compare Bishop Lightfoot' comprehensive words on Col. i. for which they were destined.' INTRODUCTION TO THE TREATISE DE SYNODIS. HILARY had taken no part in the Synod held at Ancyra in the spring of A.D. 358, but he had been made acquainted with its decisions and even with the anathemas which the legates of that Synod concealed at Sirmium. He saw that these decisions marked an approach. The horror which was felt at the Sirmian Blasphemia by those Eusebians whose only objection to the Nicene faith was that they did not understand it, augured well for the future. At the same time the majority of the Eastern bishops were deliberately heretical. It was natural that Hilary should be anxious about the episcopate of the West. He had been in exile about three years and had corresponded with the Western bishops. From several quarters letters had now ceased to arrive, and the fear came that the bishops did not care to write to one whose convictions were different to their own. Great was his joy when, at the end of the year 358, he received a letter which not only explained that the innocent cause of their silence was ignorance of his address, but also that they had persistently refused communion with Saturninus and condemned the Blasthemia. Early in 359 he dispatched to them the Liber de Synodis. It is a double letter, addressed to Western bishops, but containing passages intended for Orientals, into whose hands the letter would doubtless come in time. Hilary had recognized that the orthodox of the West had kept aloof from the orthodox of the East, firstly from ignorance of events, secondly from misunderstanding of the word ouoovotos, and thirdly from the feelings of distrust then prevalent. These facts determined the contents of his letter. He begins with an expression of the delight he experienced on receiving the news that the Gallican bishops had condemned the notorious Sirmian formula. He praises the constancy of their faith. He then mentions that he has received from certain of their number a request that he would furnish them with an account of the creeds which had been composed in the East. He modestly accedes to this request beseeching his readers not to criticise his letter until they have read the whole letter and mastered the complete argument. His aim throughout is to frustrate the heretic and assist the Catholic. In the first or historical division of the letter he promises a transcription, with ex planations, of all the creeds drawn up since the Council of Nicæa. He protests that he is not responsible for any statement contained in these creeds, and leaves his readers to judge of their orthodoxy. The Greek confessions had already been translated into Latin, but Hilary considered it necessary to give his own independent translations, the previous versions having been halfunintelligible on account of their slavish adherence to the original. The historical part of the book consists of fifty-four chapters (c. 10-63). It begins with the second Sirmian formula, and the opposing formula promulgated at Ancyra in A.D. 358. The Sirmian creed being given in c. 10, Hilary, before proceeding to give the twelve anathemas directed against its teaching by the bishops who assembled at Ancyra, explains the meaning of essentia and substantia. Concerning the former he says, Essentia est res quae est, vel ex quibus est, et quae in eo quod maneat subsistit. This essen ia is therefore identical with substantia, quia res quae est necesse est subsistat in sese. The Ancyran anathemas are then appended, with notes and a summary. In the second division (c. 29--33) of the historical part, Hilary considers the Dedication creed drawn up at Antioch in A.D. 341. He interprets it somewhat favourably. After stating that the creed is perhaps not sufficiently explicit in declaring the exact likeness of the Father and the Son, he excuses this inadequacy by pointing out that the Synod was not held to contradict Anomcean teaching, but teaching of a Sabellian tendency. The complete similarity of the Son's essence to that of the Father appears to him to be guarded by the phrase Deum de Deo, totum ex toto. The third division (c. 34-37) contains the creed drawn up by the Synod, or Cabal Synod, which met at Philippopolis in A.D. 343. Hilary does not discuss the authority of the Synod; it was enough for his purpose that it was composed of Orientals, and that its language emphatically condemns genuine Arianism and asserts the Son is God of God. The anathema which the creed pronounces on those who declare the Son to have been begotten without the Father's will, is interpreted by Hilary as an assertion that the eternal Birth was not conditioned by those passions which affect human generation. The fourth division (c. 38-61) contains the long formula drawn up at Sirmium in A.D. 351 against Photinus. The twenty-seven anathemas are then separately considered and commended. The two remaining chapters of the historical part of the work include a reflection on the many-sided character of these creeds both in their positive and negative aspects. God is infinitus et immensus, and therefore short statements concerning His nature may often prove misleading. The bishops have used many definitions and phrases because clearness will remove a danger. These frequent definitions would have been quite unnecessary if it had not been for the prevalence of heresy. Asia as a whole is ignorant of God, presenting a piteous contrast to the fide'ity of the Western bishops. The theological part of the work opens in c. 64 with Hilary's exposition of his own belief. He denies that there is in God only one personality, as he denies that there is any difference of substance. The Father is greater in that He is Father, the Son is not less because He is Son. He asks his readers to remember that if his words fall short, his meaning is sound. This done, he passes to discuss the meaning of the word ópooúrior. Three wrong meanings may be attributed to it. Firstly, it may be understood to deny the personal distinctions in the Trinity. Secondly, it may be thought to imply that the divine essence is capable of division. Thirdly, it may be represented as implying that the Father and the Son both equally partake of one prior substance. A short expression like povos must therefore receive an exact explanation. A risk is attached to its use, but there is no risk if we understand it to mean that the Father is unbegotten and the Son derives His being from the Father, and is like Him in power, and honour, and nature. The Son is subordinate to the Father as to the Author of His being, yet it was not by a robbery that He made Himself equal with God. He is not from nothing. He is wholly God. He is not the Author of the divine life, but the Image. He is no creature, but is God. Not a second God, but one God with the Father through similarity of essence. This is the ideal meaning of ouoovσios, and in this sense it is not an error to assert, but to deny, the consubstantiality. Hilary then makes a direct appeal to the Western bishops. They might forget the contents of the word while retaining the sound, but provided that the meaning was granted, what objection could be made to the word? Was the word ópolovotov free from all possible objections? Hilary (c. 72-75) shews that really like means really equal. Scripture is appealed to as proving the assertion that the Son is both like God and equal to God. This essential likeness can alone justify the statement that the Father and the Son are one. It |