340

THE DECLINE AND FALL

CHAP.

XXI.

system, a vain and argumentative disposition, acopious and flexible idiom, supplied the clergyand people of the East with an inexhaustible flowof words and distinctions; and, in the midst oftheir fierce contentions, they easily forgot thedoubt which is recommended by philosophy,and the submission which is enjoined by reli-gion. The inhabitants of the West were of aless inquisitive spirit; their passions were notso forcibly moved by invisible objects; theirminds were less frequently exercised by thehabits of dispute, and such was the happy ig-norance of the Gallican church, that Hilaryhimself, above thirty years after the first gene-ral council, was still a stranger to the Nicenecreed.' The Latins had received the rays ofdivine knowledge through the dark and doubt-ful medium of a translation. The poverty andstubbornness of their native tongue was not al-ways capable of affording just equivalents forthe Greek terms, for the technical words of theplatonic philosophy, 11 which had been conse-crated by the gospel or by the church, to ex-press the mysteries of the Christian faith ; anda verbal defect might introduce into the Latin theology a long train of error or perplex-

e Testor Deum cceli atque terras mecum nentrum audisse? semper

tamea utrumqiie sensisse.Regineratus pridem et in episcopatu

eliq uantisper manens fidcm Nicenam minqnam nisi exsulaturus au*divi. Hilar, de Synodis, c. xei, p. 1205. The benedictines are per-suaded that he governed the diocese of Poitiers several years beforehis exile.

d Seneca (Epist. lviii), complains that even the to m of the plato-nvsts (the ene of the bolder schoolmen) could not be expressed by a La-tin noun.