among the imperial troops. In the year 341 he was ordained as a missionary by the Semi-Arian party and sent back to his own country to evangelise it. This fact throws an interesting sidelight on the period of fierce controversy which follows the council of Nicæa. As we read the Church histories we are in danger of regarding it as a time when religion was nothing but a battleground of angry polemics between the factions into which the Church was broken up. But this mission of Ulfilas is a sign that something better was to be seen in it, though that did not make so much noise. It is interesting also to observe that the missionary zeal was found among the Arians, whom the Nicene party were for ever denouncing and anathematising as impious infidels.
Ulfilas was thirty years of age when he set out on his great enterprise, and he continued in it for forty years of arduous toil, amid great perils and persecutions. He began among the Visigoths beyond the Danube, where he laboured for seven years with great success. He won so many converts that the pagan chief, who appears to have been wrongly identified with Athanaric, was roused to anger and commenced a persecution of his Christian people. Ulfilas then obtained permission from Constantius to retire with his converts across the Danube into Mœsia, within the confines of the empire, settling near the foot of the mountain range of Hæmus. In the year 360 he attended a council at Constantinople, called together by the Homœan party. It was the creed of this party to which he gave his assent—a creed, it will be remembered, devised for political reasons, in order to retain Arianism within the Church. It aimed at so doing by putting an end to controversy, by excluding all party watchwords—homoousios, homoiousios, and the rest, and affirming a simple likeness between the First and Second Persons in the Trinity.
There is no reason to doubt that Ulfilas was perfectly honest in the theological position he occupied. As an earnest missionary, more concerned with practical evan-
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