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The Arians, as we have said, held their meetings without the city.
As often therefore as the festal days occurred--I mean Saturday and
Lord's day--in each week, on which assemblies are usually held in
the churches, they congregated within the city gates about the public
squares, and sang responsive verses adapted to the Arian heresy.
This they did during the greater part of the night: and again in the
morning, chanting the same songs which they called responsive, they
paraded through the midst of the city, and so passed out of the gates
to go to their places of assembly. But since they did not desist from
making use of insulting expressions in relation to the Homoousians
often singing such words as these: 'Where are they that say three
things are but one power? --John fearing lest any of the more simple
should be drawn away from the church by such kind of hymns, opposed to
them some of his own people, that they also employing themselves m
chanting nocturnal hymns, might obscure the effort of the Arians, and
confirm his own party in the profession of their faith. John's design
indeed seemed to be good, but it issued in tumult and dangers. For as
the Homoousians performed their nocturnal hymns with greater
display,--for there were invented by John silver crosses for them on
which lighted wax-tapers were carried, provided at the expense of the
empress Eudoxia,--the Arians who were very numerous, and fired
with envy, resolved to revenge themselves by a desperate and riotous
attack upon their rivals. For from the remembrance of their own recent
domination, they were full of confidence in their ability to overcome,
and of contempt for their adversaries. Without delay therefore, on
one of these nights, they engaged in a conflict; and Briso, one of
the eunuchs of the empress, who was at that time leading the chanters
of these hymns, was wounded by a stone in the forehead, and also some
of the people on both sides were killed. Whereupon the emperor being
angered, forbade the Arians to chant their hymns any more in public.
Such were the events of this occasion.
We must now however make some allusion to the origin of this custom in
the church of responsive singing. Ignatius third bishop of Antioch in
Syria from the apostle Peter, who also had held intercourse with the
apostles themselves, saw a vision of angels hymning in alternate chants
the Holy Trinity. Accordingly he introduced the mode of singing he
had observed in the vision into the Antiochian church; whence it was
transmitted by tradition to all the other churches. Such is the
account [we have received] in relation to these responsive hymns.
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