The lectures provided a backdrop for the degrees by giving lessons in comparative religion, history, and philosophy."

    I venture the attempt in the belief that, seeing they are one of the modes in which his unseen life found expression, we are bound through them to arrive at some knowledge of that life. For he has come, The Word of God, that we may know God: every word of his then, as needful to the knowing of himself, is needful to the knowing of God, and we must understand, as far as we may, every one of his words and every one of his actions, which, with him, were only another form of word. I believe this the immediate end of our creation. And I believe that this will at length result in the unravelling for us of what must now, more or less, appear to every man the knotted and twisted coil of the universe.

    John Henry Newman's account of the great struggle over Christian doctrine in the fourth century shows the first signs of his later views on development. It was also in many ways a "tract for the times" -- a warning to the Anglican Church of the 1830s of the dangers of state interference in religious debate and of the need for theologically educated leadership.This book is taken from Newman's 1871 revision of the text. It contains some additional material and a fuller apparatus of references. This present edition also includes an introduction and notes which attempt to put the work into its context in the nineteenth century Church, but also to explain how scholarship has altered our view of the subject matter. The Arians of the Fourth Century remains a startlingly original essay on the methods of intellectual history within the Christian church, and a powerful statement by Newman of a vision of the church that is not yet fully in tune with Roman Catholic teaching, yet is also at odds with much of the traditional theology of the Church of England.