But the outcome of the affair showed that the business had been carried out by such a stratagem. For these men being removed out of the way, immediately a synod was gathered at Ariminum. There, according to what the Easterners had drawn up at Seleucia, crafty and cunning men easily circumvented the simple and inexperienced priests of the West, by proposing to them in this manner: Whom did they rather wish to worship and adore—the homoousion, or Christ? And since they were ignorant of the force of the word, of what homoousion meant, the term was twisted as into a kind of loathing and abomination, while they affirmed that they believed in Christ, not in the homoousion.
Thus the minds of many—except for a few who fell knowingly—being deceived, and going contrary to what the fathers had drawn up at Nicaea, they decreed that the homoousion, as a word unknown and foreign to the Scriptures, should be removed from the Exposition of the faith, and they defiled their own communion by fellowship with heretics. At that season the face of the Church was foul and exceedingly base. For she was being ravaged, not as before by outsiders, but by her own. One put another to flight, and another was put to flight, and each belonged to the Church. Nowhere was there an altar, nor sacrifice, nor libations; yet there was transgression and falling, and the ruin of many. The penalty was alike, but the victory unequal. They were tortured alike, but they were not glorified alike: