Cheerful by name, cheerful by theology: that was Hilarius. (Today he is ponderously styled ‘Hilary of Poitiers’, but that only shows what a sad state we are in.) With wits like a rapier and manners like a lamb, he gave his life and liberty to defend the Son’s eternal deity. He argued powerfully that the followers of Arius, who held that the Son had begun to exist at some point, were making a disastrous mistake: saying that there had not always been a Son meant that God had not always been a Father. Thus God is not fundamentally a Father, not essentially loving and life-giving, but something
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