The Church in its early days went fierce and fast with any warhorse; yet it is utterly unhistoric to say that she merely went mad along one idea, like a vulgar fanaticism.
She swerved to left and right, so as exactly to avoid enormous obstacles.

She left on one hand the huge bulk of Arianism, buttressed by all the worldly powers to make Christianity too worldly.

The next instant she was swerving to avoid an orientalism, which would have made it too unworldly.

The orthodox Church never took the tame course or accepted the conventions; the orthodox Church was never respectable.

It would have been easier to have accepted the earthly power of the Arians.
It would have been easy, in the Calvinistic seventeenth century, to fall into the bottomless pit of predestination.