and the unity of God. When Hippolytus assailed it, therefore, he obtained no hearing and was treated as merely another disturber of the Church's peace. His assault did not, indeed, fail of all effect: he rendered it impossible for Modalism to be adopted in its crudest form, and forced modifications in it by which it was given the appearance of more nearly covering the main facts of the revelation of God in the Gospel. But he could by no means turn the thoughts of men into a different channel; neither, indeed, was he capable of digging a channel into which their thoughts might justly flow. The outcome, therefore, was only that Callistus excommunicated both Sabellius and Hippolytus and set forth as the Christian faith a new doctrine which was intended to declare the central truths of the Gospel as understood by men of moderation and balanced judgment. Hippolytus looked on this new doctrine as itself essentially Modalism, with a tendency downward. And Hippolytus was right. But it commended itself powerfully to the age, and that not merely in Rome, but in Africa. It is this refined Modalism of the Roman compromise, which seemed to be threatening to become the Christianity of the West, that Tertullian attacks in his tract against Praxeas.
It is not necessary for our present purpose to trace the gradual modifications which the Monarchian teaching underwent from its earliest form as taught at Rome by Noëtus and possibly by Praxeas to its fullest development and most advanced adjustment in the hands of Callistus to the fundamental Church doctrines of God and Christ. Suffice it to say that the modifications by which Callistus sought to “catholicize” Monarchian modalism, proceeded by according some sort of recognition to the Logos doctrine on the one hand, and on the other by softening the crass assertion that it was the Father who suffered on the cross. Of course no personal distinction between Father and Son, or God and Logos, was admitted. But a nominal distinction was accorded, and this distinction was given quasi-validity by a further distinction of times. “Callistus says,” explains Hippolytus,[1] “that the same Logos is at once Son and Father, distinguished in name, but really one individual Spirit, . . . . and that the Spirit incarnated in the virgin is not different from the Father but one and the same . . . . . For that which is seen, which is of course the man,—it is that which is the Son; but the Spirit which is contained in the Son is the Father, since there are not two Gods, Father and Son, but one. Now, the Father being in him,”—i.e., the Son, which is the “man” or the “flesh, ”—“seeing that he had
