"His death was variously ascribed to despair, to poison, and to the divine justice." Licinius, succeeding to the command of the eastern provinces, disgraced his triumph by the extirpation of his rival's house, and by the cold-blooded murders of Severianus, the son of Severus; of Candidianus, the natural son of his own ancient friend Galerius; and of Valeria, the daughter, and Prisca, the wife, of Diocletian, who was still alive to be afflicted by their fate.* In this same year, however, Diocletian was removed by death from the memory of past greatness and the sense of present sorrow, at the very epoch at which the religion he had persecuted was adopted by Constantine.

Constantine marked the restoration of tranquillity by promulgating the EDICT OF MILAN in favour of the Christians and for the establishment of that noblest of all political doctrines, which Christians cannot abandon without betraying their own want of faith-UNIVERSAL RELIGIOUS TOLERATION. During the last century, the growth of opinion, in our own country at least, enables us to admit the humiliating truth, which Gibbon records with exultation,—that states and even churches professing Christianity have outraged this great principle, without confessing that any slur is thereby cast upon genuine Christianity. The Gospel of love and peace and liberty is guiltless of the crimes which despotism and priestcraft have committed in its name; crimes which are most chiefly marked as atrocious by the sacredness of the cause which they profane. They cannot sully the light that exposes their darkness. We may therefore record with indignation, unmingled with any shame for Christianity, that while the parallel between Diocletian and Charles V. was made complete in the legacy of religious persecution which each despot, upon his abdication, left to his successors, the cruelties of Alva in the Netherlands, to which 100,000 persons are stated, on the calm authority of Grotius, to have fallen victims, probably surpassed all that were inflicted on the Christians throughout the whole Roman empire.

The degree to which, in the West, the mild temper of Constantius mitigated the sufferings which he was compelled as Cæsar to permit his officers to inflict, cannot be fairly estimated from the partial testimony of Eusebius, the panegyrist of Constantine; but we cannot but suspect gross exaggeration in the statement preserved by Bede, that no less than 17,000 British Christians were martyred in a single month. Among these, tradition has recorded the name of St. Alban, which was transferred to Verulamium, the

* See Gibbon's account of their romantic story, chap. xiv.

old capital of the Trinobantes, and the place of his martyrdom. In Spain the prefect Datianus enforced the decrees of Diocletian, with little regard to the wishes of Constantius. But the persecution in the West could not have lasted above a year (A.D. 303— 304), for it ceased on the elevation of Constantius to the dignity of Augustus.

In Italy and Africa, Maximian, and after him Severus, were the fit agents of the cruelties proclaimed by Diocletian and Galerius; but, strange to say, the rise of Maxentius put a stop to the persecution. If his toleration sprang from the desire of rallying his Christian subjects to his support, his dealings with the bishops of Rome and Carthage proved, on the other hand, his resolution to permit no ecclesiastical encroachment on the civil authority. In the latter case especially it is interesting to trace the beginning of those attempts, by which the states of Christendom were afterwards convulsed, to screen clerical offenders from the jurisdiction of the ordinary courts. It was in the East, under Galerius and Maximin, that the persecution raged in full fury for eight years. But in the year 311, shortly before his death, Galerius issued an edict of toleration, which even Gibbon regards as the fruit of the frequent disappointments of his ambitious views, and of the salutary reflections which a lingering and painful distemper suggested to the mind of Galerius. The edict, which was published in the name of Constantine and Licinius, as well as his own, is a most interesting exposition of the motives, first for beginning, and then for abandoning, a persecution. After setting forth his intention "to correct and re-establish all things according to the ancient laws and public discipline of the Romans," the emperor proceeds: "We were particularly desirous of reclaiming into the way of reason and nature the deluded Christians, who had renounced the religion and ceremonies instituted by their fathers, and, presumptuously despising the practice of antiquity, had invented extravagant laws and opinions according to the dictates of their fancy, and had collected a various society from the different provinces of our empire. The edicts which we have published to enforce the worship of the gods

* The tradition is that Alban, a pagan resident of Verulamium, charitably gave shelter to a Christian minister named Amphibalus, and was converted by him. Amphibalus having escaped by Alban's assistance, the latter was seized, and, refusing to renounce his faith, was scourged and beheaded. On the spot where he suffered martyrdom "a church, built of wonderful workmanship," afterwards arose, to which a monastic institution was added by king Offa, about 787, the abbot of which received from Pope Adrian IV. precedence above all others, on account of its patron saint being regarded as the proto-martyr of England. (Annals of England, vol. i. p. 37.)

having exposed many of the Christians to danger and distress, many having suffered death, and many more, who still persist in their impious folly, being left destitute of any public exercise of religion, we are disposed to extend to those unhappy men the effects of our wonted clemency. We permit them, therefore, freely to profess their private opinions, and to assemble in their conventicles without fear or molestation, provided always that they preserve a due respect to the established laws and government. By another rescript we shall signify our intentions to the judges and magistrates, and we hope that our indulgence will engage the Christians to offer up their prayers to the Deity whom they adore for our safety and prosperity, for their own, and for that of the Republic." The spectacle of a heathen emperor restoring to a proscribed sect the free exercise of their religion, rather than leave them without any public worship, imposing no other condition than obedience to the laws, and even asking for the benefit of their prayers, may give a lesson to all surviving adherents of intolerance. Even Maximin, though his name was not included in the rescript, no sooner succeeded to the dominion of the East, than he suffered the inflexible obstinacy of the Christians to be pleaded as a reason of suspending the attempt to reclaim them. But the superstition, which he added to his cruelty, made him take part in the efforts of the philosophers to give new life to heathenism. Temples were repaired, and new orders of priests were established in the cities of the East; and the petitions of their people for the enforcement of the laws were answered by rescripts, enjoining the infliction upon the Christians of all punishments short of death; and even this, according to the Christian writers, was not spared. Fear of Constantine and Licinius seems to have imposed a check on Maximin; and, just before his death, he also, like Galerius, published an edict of toleration, laying the blame of the past upon the governors and magistrates, who had misunderstood his intentions. Among the details of the great Diocletian persecution, which the limits of our plan compel us to leave to the church historian, some of the most interesting are the questions which arose concerning the treatment of those who had lapsed into idolatry, and who, on the return of peace, sought restoration into the Church.

The death of Maximin, and the perfect accord established for

*This word, conventiculum, that is, a place of assembly, corresponding exactly to synagogue, was the regular name used in the Latin language for the buildings in which the Christians met for public worship.

the time with Licinius, left Constantine at liberty to carry out the policy of toleration which he had inherited from his father. But, if we are to believe one of the most celebrated traditions of ecclesiastical antiquity, the Edict of Milan was not merely the proclamation of a wise policy, but the thank-offering of a convert for a sign from heaven-as great as that vouchsafed to Paul-which preceded and assured the triumph of Saxa Rubra.

The story was related by Constantine, in the freedom of conversation, to his biographer Eusebius. He declared that, in the course of his march to confront Maxentius, he beheld in the heavens, surmounting and outshining the noonday sun, a figure of the Cross, inscribed with the legend, BY THIS CONQUER. The vision was seen by the whole army; but the vague astonishment, which the emperor at first shared with his soldiers, was changed into faith, when, in the following night, Christ himself appeared to him in a dream, holding a cross of the same form that he had seen in the sky, and commanded him to make a standard after the like pattern, and to bear it, in full assurance of victory, against Maxentius and all future enemies. The sacred standard, called Labarum, is still seen on the coins of the Christian emperors; and on one of Constantius II., the son of Constantine, it is accompanied with the motto:-"By this sign thou shalt conquer." It is represented as a long pike, with a transverse rod, from which hung a silken banner bearing a device expressive at once of the form of the Cross and of the Greek initials of the name of Christ.* The Labarum was entrusted to a guard of fifty men, distinguished not only by pay and honours, but, in the popular belief, by a special exemption from danger on the battle-field.

The actual use of the banner, and the enthusiasm it excited in the army of Constantine, are more substantial facts than the alleged cause of its invention. Eusebius has too often betrayed a weakness of judgment, and a tendency to represent doubtful facts in the form most favourable to the Christian cause, to be regarded as an impartial narrator of the communication made to him alone of what Constantine alone had seen. Still more suspicious is the unsupported testimony of the emperor. In an age when Christians, regretting the loss of the primitive miraculous powers, had borrowed from the heathen priests the evil principle of pious

* In some cases the monogram was worked in gold on the top of the staff, and the banner was embroidered with the figure of Christ, or with those of the emperor and his children.

frauds, the temptation was great for Constantine to imagine or to feign himself the divinely sent champion of the cause which he had victoriously espoused. Of his feelings in relation to Christianity, at the time of his war with Maxentius, we have no clear knowledge. The principles learnt from his father doubtless disposed him to view the Christians with favour; and policy may have taught him to look for the support of a body which even a Maxentius sought to conciliate. A mind exalted by the decisive contest to which he was committed, may have so acted upon a frame excited by the fatigue of the march under an Italian sun, as to imagine amidst the noonday glare the bright vision of the symbol of the Christian faith; nor was it less easy in after days for memory to play fantastic tricks with the prince whom churchmen flattered as the nursing father of the faith. It is not, however, the business of the historian to balance conflicting theories of fanaticism or imposture, nor to speculate on the verisimilitude of such a stamp of divine authority being set upon the former character and the subsequent career of Constantine. As a question of evidence, it is impossible to accept the miracle on the unsupported testimony of the man who was so deeply interested in imposing the belief of it on others and on himself.* It is incredible-and here is a most marked distinction between the visions of Paul and Constantine -that a man could have thus "seen Christ" without henceforth devoting himself to the Christian cause; and the uncritical believers of the miracle accept it to the full extent of Constantine's conversion. It is a sufficient comment on this view, that one of Constantine's first acts at Rome was to accept the dignity of Chief Pontiff; and we have many other proofs that he was not yet a Christian. At what time he became one, until he was baptized on his deathbed, is indeed so doubtful, that the question is still open whether he himself can be considered a Christian at all. The character of the man who made Christianity the established religion of the empire has been naturally debated, with all the keenness of party spirit, not only as between believers and unbelievers, but between those who view his patronage as a benefit or an injury to Christianity itself. The fairest judgment upon the

* The statement that the vision was seen by the army would be worthless as resting on the sole testimony of Constantine, years after the event; and when we remember how notorious the truth would in that case have become, and how many witnesses might have been brought forward to support it, the argument is turned against the reality of the vision. Besides, a confirmation that appeared so important might easily have been slipped in by a narrator so little scrupulous as Eusebius too often proves himself.