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elders, representing their sick old bishop, could have detected the predecessors of Pandulf or of Wolsey." Milan, Calabria, Sicily, and Gaul, sent each one bishop; and the most remote, but most important, was Hosius, of Corduba in Spain, the confidant of Constantine. Pannonia sent Domnus, and even the Goths were represented by Theophilus, the teacher of the great evangelist of the nation, Ulphilas. The bishops alone voted; but the presbyters took an active part in the discussions, the course of which must be left to the ecclesiastical historians. It is enough to say that the main issue was at last reduced literally to "one jot" (the Greek letter iota). Both parties were prepared to subscribe the same creed, except for the difference of that single letter in a single word. In the confession :-"I believe in ONE GOD, the FATHER ALMIGHTY, Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible: And in ONE LORD Jesus Christ, the only-begotten SON OF GOD, begotten of his Father before all worlds, Very God of very God, Begotten, not made, Being of one substance with the Father," the general form of which was first proposed by the semi-Arian, Eusebius of Cæsarea, the Arians would have been content with the substitution of the phrase, "Being of a like substance with the Father." On this point, which gave the two parties the names of Homousians and Homoiousians, the decision turned: Arius was anathematized by the Council, for no affirmation of truth was henceforth deemed valid without a curse on its deniers; and the civil arm followed up the sentence by banishing him to Illyricum, with two African bishops, who alone of all his friends remained firm against the persuasions of their brethren and the threats of Constantine. The later history of Arius is obscure: we only know that he was restored to the communion of the Church, but not permitted to return to Alexandria. His death, which seems to have taken place at Constantinople in 336, was ascribed by the Athanasian party to a divine judgment, on the eve of his formal reception into fellowship, and by some of the Arians to poison. The relation in which the Nicene Council left Constantine himself to the Christian Church is well defined by Dean Stanley:"His leading idea was to restore peace to the Church, as he had restored it to the Empire. In the execution of this idea two courses of action presented themselves to him, as they have to all ecclesiastical statesmen ever since. He stands at the head of all, in the

• 'Oμoovσios, or duoúotos, in English characters, Homousios.
† Ὁμοιούσιος, Homoiousios.

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fact that he combined them both in himself. In him both the latitudinarian and the persecutor may find their earliest precedents, which were both alike approved by the ecclesiastics of that age, though in later times he has been as severely condemned for the one as he has been praised for the other. No scheme of comprehension has been broader, on the one hand, than that put forward in his letter of advice to Alexander and Arius; and on the other, when this failed, he still pursued the same end, with the same tenacity, by the directly opposite means of enforcing uniformity, to us long familiar, but first introduced by him into the Church, the hitherto unknown practice of subscription to the articles of a written creed, and the infliction of civil penalties on those who refused to conform."

If in some features of this picture we recognise a parallel to the first princely "head upon earth of the Church of England,” the resemblance is not diminished by those domestic tragedies which marked the latter part of Constantine's reign as far worse than the beginning a deterioration which we may ascribe in part to the flattery of his ecclesiastical courtiers, and in part to the demoralizing influence of oriental habits. In the year after the Council of Nice (A.D. 326), he visited Rome to celebrate the festival of his Vicennalia. His arrival happened just before the 15th of July, "The proud Ides of Quinctilis,"

when the battle of the Lake Regillus was celebrated by the annual procession of the equestrian order

"From Castor in the Forum

To Mars without the wall."

The emperor was so imprudent as to deride the pageant in which he had refused to share; and when, in the riot that ensued, word was brought to him that stones had been thrown at the head of one of his statues, he drily replied, as he passed his hand over his face, "It is very surprising, but I do not feel in the least hurt."

This dangerous comedy was succeeded by a fearful domestic tragedy, only paralleled in later history by those of Philip II., Isabella, and Don Carlos, of Peter the Great and his son Alexis. The imperial family consisted, first, of the emperor and his mother Helena, and his three half-brothers, the sons of Constantius by Theodora, the step-daughter of Maximian. Next, Constantine, like his father, before his union to Maximian's other daughter, Fausta, had contracted an alliance with the low-born Minervina, who became the mother of Crispus, while Fausta had borne to him

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Helena CONSTANTIUS I. Theodora (step-daughter of the emperor MAXIMIAN). Imp. d. A.D. 306. [

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(See below.)

Fausta (daughter of MAXIMIAN).

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Constantine, Constantius, and Constans. Moreover, Constantia, the sister of Constantine, married to Licinius at Milan in the year 313, had a son Licinius, on whom Constantine had conferred the dignity of Cæsar, as well as upon his own sons, in A.D. 317. Amongst the members of this august family, Crispus was as conspicuous for his personal merits as for his position next the throne. His amiable nature was trained and his accomplishments cultivated by the great Christian orator Lactantius, and his victory in the Hellespont had established his military reputation. He became the favourite of the people; but that very favour inflamed the jealousy between his father and himself, which was the natural result of his position as the son of a repudiated wife. The appointment of his half-brother Constantius to the prefecture of the Gauls, with the title of Cæsar, while still an infant, seems to have determined Crispus to claim the dignity of Augustus, which Constantine refused him. The events that followed are obscure; but amidst the darkness there is evidence of intrigues, in which it is impossible to determine whether Crispus had or had not a share. It would have been strange indeed if Constantine, the conqueror in a civil war, and the patron of a new religion, had been exempt from the plots which are the constant terror of monarchs ; and many perfidious flatterers must have surrounded the young prince, ready to urge him on to any rashness.

As early as the 1st of October, A.D. 325, we have an edict in which Constantine alludes to a secret conspiracy, and, while praying for the protection of the Deity, he follows the example of his worst predecessors by inviting informers to accuse even his most trusted officers and his nearest friends. The certainty that such wretches would not spare Crispus may be connected with the probability that Rome, the centre of the ancient faith, which had been deserted, like herself, by the emperor, might seek a new Augustus in his son; and the tumult of the Julian Ides might well strengthen such a suspicion. The 24th of the same month was the twentieth anniversary of Constantine's accession, and Crispus shared with his father the congratulations of the Senate and the people. "Every eye and every tongue affected to express their sense of the general happiness, and the veil of ceremony and dissimulation was drawn for awhile over the darkest designs of revenge and murder "—are words which perhaps apply to more than one of the actors in the pageant. In the midst of the festival Crispus was arrested, and, after a brief examination in private, sent secretly to Pola in Istria, where he was soon afterwards put

to death. The young Licinius was involved in his fate, with many of their noble friends. But the story that the empress Fausta, after instigating Constantine to the murder of her step-son, fell herself by the revenge of Helena, who discovered to Constantine his wife's intrigue with a groom of the imperial stables, is at least doubtful. The Roman populace once more asserted their freedom of comment on the actions of their princes by lampoons affixed to the palace gate, which declared that the age of Nero had returned.

After this tragedy, Constantine took his final departure from Rome; and four years later the imperial city was degraded from the rank of the capital by the dedication of CONSTANTINOPLE, the "city of Constantine" (A.D. 330). The accompanying map will convey a clear idea of that unrivalled site, which we can spare but a few words to describe.

[graphic][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed][subsumed]

PLAN OF CONSTANTINOPLE. (AA, Chrysoceras, Golden Horn.) The voyager, who passes from the beautiful Archipelago of the Egæan into the vast land-locked sea, whose name was changed

"Those," observes Gibbon, "who have attacked, and those who have defended the character of Constantine, have alike disregarded two very remarkable passages of two orations, pronounced under the succeeding reign. The former (by Julian) celebrates the virtues, the beauty, and the fortune of the empress Fausta, the daughter, wife, sister, and mother of so many princes. The latter (a monody on Constantine II.) asserts, in explicit terms, that the mother of the younger Constantine, who was slain three years after his father's death, survived to weep over the fate of her son." As to the execution of Crispus, the unsparing censure of Gibbon should be compared with Niebuhr's more qualified opinion :-" If people will make a tragedy of this event, I must confess that I do not see how it can be proved that Crispus was innocent. When I read of so many insurrections of sons against their fathers, there seems to me nothing improbable in supposing that Crispus, who was Cæsar, and demanded the title of Augustus, which his father refused him, may have thought, 'Well, if I do not make something of myself, my father will not, for he will certainly prefer the sons

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