' It' is a noteworthy fact that after the ex ternsl persecution of the Church stopped, in ternal dissensions and heresies of various kinds seriously 'disturbed Christian peace. The end of the 4th century saw the beginning of the unfortunate series of divisions, but there was scarcely a decade of the,5th century that did not witness some heretical development. Arian.! ism! declined, but subtle distinctions were made, and: the MonnohYaite heresy declared that there hut one -nature in Christ. Then the tion• of free will and predestination came up, and 'Pelagianism, had to be controverted and then: semi-Balagianism, a sort of compromise. The Nestorian* insisted that the incarnation • meant no more than an indwelling of the divine nature in Christ, and that consequently God had not been truly made man. There were two persons, one divine and the other human, and it, was of. the •hurnan person that Mary was the mother. It was around this last question that the,porlar heresy turned. A series of EcuT metuca that is universal, councils were held to contradict, these heresies. The first of these, held in IsFieei. or Nice (325), corrected the Arian teaching.:. The second Ecumenical Council of •.Constantinople (381) concerned the teaching at to the .Holy Ghost ; the third that of Ephesus (431), Corrected the errors of Nestorius. and .Palagian; and atm fourth, that 'of Chalcedon, ;Was (451). In the ..., • meantime a number of less important Councils and Synods were held in various parts of the world for the correction of various phases of these heresies and the development of church regulations.
Eudoxia, the contemporary of Pulcheria, was almost an exact contrast in many ways to her sister-in-law — a contrast historically illu minating, for it exhibits the same variety of character in the 5th century as at all other times. She finds a place in history as the result of a which would usually be supposed to be reserved for modern centuries and be quite impossible under the conditions of Oriental life even among Christians. She was just the handsome, vivacious 20-year old daughter of a professor at Athens who lavished his erudition on her. The young emperor Theodosius saw her and was struck with her beauty and intel ligence and fell in love with her. His sister Pulcheria arranged the marriage. The young Empress of the East soon found to her dis appointment that while she swayed her hus band's heart, she could not influence his ad ministration as she wished, for with regard to that he turned to his sister Pulcheria. After
20 years of Imperial life, she fell under the suspicion of marital infidelity, probably unjustly, but was forced into retirement at Jerusalem. Here she spent the last 20 years of her life in good works and quiet meditation at the Holy Places. She wrote a series of poems, mainly on religious subjects, though one had for its theme her husband's victory over the Persians. Her most famous work is a paraphrase of the Bible in verse which has been warmly praised by commentators. Her excellent sense of liter ary values is best revealed by the fact that we Owe to her the primitive literary form of one of the world's great stories. This is the tale of Cyprian and Justina, that is of a man who sold his soul to the devil for knowledge and when dissatisfied with this, afterward for a woman. This later became the Faust legend, so often turned to by great poets as a nucleus around which to gather their thoughts with regard to human life. Calderon uses the story in its earlier Christian form almost as it came from the hand of Eudoxia as a plot for his greatest play, 'El Magico ; Mar lowe in the specious Elizabethan period wrote his greatest drama around it, while Goethe made from it the great literary masterpiece of the 19th century. The Faust legend and the Arthur legends, both from this time, have been great resources for the modern poets.
The literature of the 5th century is of no great significance and yet there are some names in it that have lived. Claudian or Claudianus, the Latin poet, probably died just as the cen tury was opening. Prudentius and Ausonius, Christian Latin poets, left verses that are well known and some of the hymns of Prudentius are still in use in the Church. Macrobius, a Platonic philosopher, and Isidore and Socrates who wrote ecclesiastical history and Orosius, a Spanish disciple of Saint Augustine, are still referred to by those who care to know the history and thought of the time as it appeared in the eyes of contemporaries. Sozomen and Theodoret, further ecclesiastical historians, are also well known. The time was waking up to the necessity of telling its story if that was to be known by posterity.
Jamas J..WaLszt, Author of (The Thirteenth the Greatest of etc.