and sources of Arianism.[1] Arius was condemned in his own Church at Alexandria quite early in the development of his teaching, and the place was soon made too hot for him, so that he had to escape. After that it is not likely that anything more would have been heard of Arianism if he had not made a convert of the influential Eusebius of Nicomedia, court chaplain to Constantine, a vigorous, astute, unscrupulous ecclesiastical politician. Subsequently, whenever the heresy is dominant in Alexandria, that is only owing to the forcible intrusion of an alien bishop, who obtains and holds the patriarchal chair by the aid of the imperial troops. In this way Arianism in Egypt came to be synonymous with tyranny and oppression, and its supremacy involved the Coptic Church in persecution.
It was not here, therefore, that the Copts were inclined to fall out of line with the Catholic Church. Their tendency drove them in quite the opposite direction. It pointed to the accentuation of the idea of the Divinity of Christ to the neglect of His humanity. Alexandria took the lead in opposition to Nestorianism. Here, as so often in other connections, the rivalry between Alexandria and Constantinople embittered the controversy, degrading it with political intrigue and the heat of offensive personalities, Cyril has been canonised and his writings are accounted standards of orthodoxy. But the unprejudiced reader must admit that they go a long way to prepare for the heresy that was to be condemned at the next œcumenical council, the denial of the two natures in Christ by the virtual suppresion of the human.
Eutyches followed on similar lines, and yet his development of the same trend of thought did not meet with the approval of the Church, and came under condemnation as a heresy. Now it is true that this heresy first appeared at Constantinople. Its advocate Eutyches was the archimandrite of a large monastery near that city. But he was a friend of Cyril, from whom he had received a copy
