and not false men; and if they were true, those things which we confess of Christ, and which we have received from their preaching and writings, the Christian Church holds to be true, because those who delivered them were true.
CHAPTER IV.
On the different Sects.
When the light of Christ's brightness, shed abroad by these preachers, had scattered the darkness of error from the face of the world, idolatry ceased, and the worship of pictures and molten images passed away, and the earth was cleansed from the abomination of sacrifices and unclean rites, and the inhabitants of the world learned goodness, holiness, humility, and gentleness, and the earth was full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. This filled Satan with envy and rage, and he forthwith proceeded to act towards us as he had acted towards Adam; so that after the Apostles, and their disciples, and their immediate successors, had slept. Christians rose up against each other, and divisions and controversies sprung up among them, and heresies without number increased in the Church of Christ, until they went so far as to compass each other's destruction, and regarded each other as infidels deserving of death. How many false doctrines were rife, and how many crimes were perpetrated in those days, we learn from the histories of Mar Eusebius. On account of these things, the Œcumenical Council of the 318 was convened, by order of the good and Christ-loving Emperor and Saint Constantine, in the year of Alexander 636, and by the power of the Spirit, and by proofs adduced from the Holy Scriptures, they decreed, interpreted, enlightened, disclosed, manifested, and confirmed, the orthodox faith; and by strong argument, and with words of sound doctrine, they condemned all the heresiarchs, excommunicated and cut them off from the body of Christ, as being diseased members not susceptible of cure. And thus the Catholic Church was purified from every stain of vain worship and false doctrine, and all the world, from the rising of the sun to the going down of the same, was of one mind, and of one Church.
