AERIANS, i-e'ri-unz, a religious sect who arose in the 4th centusy of the Christian Church and present many features of modern religious liberalism in the way they combatted ecclesiastical tradition and the institutionalism professedly derived from the apostolic age. They derive their name from their originator and leader, Kerins, a presbyter of Sebaste, a city of Pontus. Aerius flourished about 355 A.D. He was fired with a spirit of revolt against the condition of the Church as he found it. Although an ascetic of a very stern and rigid character, he was shocked at the extravagant lengths to which some of his fellow Christians carried the practice of fasting, and the claims which' they made to merit because of this rigorous self-maceration. Although he found fasting a settled institution of the Church he opposed the practice because of the delusions it seemed to lead to. He was also an opposer of those special festivals of intercession which were held in behalf of the faithful departed. for the living, whose needs and suffer ings some of which you may have he seems to say. To this vigorous and uncompro
mising onslaught on the common and ordinary practices of the Church he recalls such earnest and outspoken fathers of the Reformation as Martin Luther and John Knox. There were a great many people who sympathized and agreed with him, and his sect at one time was very flourishing. The ascendancy of the episcopal order in the Church was a natural aristocratic movement, although Bishop Lightfoot in com mentary on the Philippians does not seem to think that it was sanctioned either by divine command or apostolic precedent. Kerins main tained that the bishop was not superior to the presbyter, that they were of the same order, and that a bishop was merely a chairman elected for convenience sake to preside among equals. He seems also to have been opposed to holding of any such set festivals in the Church as Easter. This sect seems to have sown the earliest seed of modern Presbyterianism.