STANTINE.

ANCIENT history records three great Revolutions; it may be doubted whether modern history can parallel them for magnitude and importance. They are the conquest of the East by Alexander, the establishment of the Roman Empire by Cæsar and Augustus, and the recognition of Christianity by Constantine. In each of these cases a simple and definite course of action, if not a single act, produced immediate results which changed the whole face of human civilization, not for the time only, but for a long course of centuries. The first made the culture of Greece commensurate with the whole civilized world; the second established on a lasting basis the polity of Rome and Western Europe; the last still constitutes the deep and broad foundation of all Christian society. The institution of feudalism under the banners of the northern nations, the overthrow of feudalism and construction of the balance of power between the federated States of Europe in more modern times, the revival of learning, the Reformation, and the enfranchisement, still more recently, of human thought these, and possibly some others, may be adduced as the great revolutions of the later ages of the world's history; but these were, each and all, the complex and chronic development of ideas and circumstances, and have little of the definite unity of the most conspicuous events of antiquity. Of the three great revolutions of ancient history, the last was assuredly the greatest. Surely no single event, no connected series of political transformations, has occurred, before or since, to equal it in importance even for the temporal interests of mankind.

after the highest and noblest conception of the divinity, to construct his system of morality upon the principles of a pure and vital religion, to found human society upon laws, as he believes, divinely revealed to him. Upon this basis all Christian civilization has been established; and the Christian is still commensurate with nearly all of human civilization.

But of the far-reaching ideas which spring up from the momentary contemplation of the magnitude of this event, the recognition of Christianity by Constantine, we will allow ourselves a glimpse only. Let us rather go back to their historical origin, and confine ourselves to an examination into the character and motives of Constantine himself, and into the political significance of the institutions which have rendered him historically illustrious. Let us realise the recognition of Christianity, by a review of the circumstances and the agency by which it was brought about. There was a moment when this revolution was actually seen in event and gress, when men's views of it were not formed and modified by the consciousness of its results, as ours cannot but be. Constantine had his contemporaries: how did Constantine regard his own work, and how did his contemporaries regard it? Putting aside, then, the theological considerations with which this famous event is shaded or reflected in the aspect which it most commonly presents to us, let us rather regard it in the character and the policy of its historical author.

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The immediate predecessors of Constantine had divided the inheritance of the Cæsars among a number of rulers, studiously connected together by blood or marriage,

and bound to maintain, as by a kind of family compact, the substantial unity of the Empire, of which each one governed his allotted portion with conjoint or delegated authority. Diocletian had obtained the purple alone. He had been no other than a common soldier, an Illyrian by birth, raised to power by the acclamations of the most numerous or the most energetic of the Roman armies on the frontiers. For at least two generations the soldiers had assumed without disguise the choice of their Emperors, and imposed them without hesitation upon the Senate and the subject. The Senate had often murmured, and more than once rebelled; but the soldiers had acted as the legitimate authority, and promptly put down and punished the rebellion. The subject had generally been quiescent. The army was too strong for both together; circumstances were too strong for them. For a hundred years the Empire had been face to face with the barbarians; and once at least within the memory of the living generation the brigands of the north had penetrated into Italy, and had revived the terrors of a Gaulish invasion within the immediate precincts of the capital. But the army was recruited from the tribes of the frontier, even from the barbarians themselves. It was nothing new, then, that the Emperor should be a rude soldier, a provincial, a stranger, utterly devoid of all Roman sympathies. Such is the declaration of our written histories; and these seem even now to be curiously attested and illustrated by existing remains, which are not without their historical significance. We may still learn something about the progress of these events from the vast series of busts and statues collected in the museums of Italy. The images of the Cæsars and of their contemporaries faithfully preserve the well-known type of the true Roman physiognomy. The great men of the generations that succeed them are no longer genuine Romans by birth; they are provincials by extraction; their countenances are more cosmopolite in expression, but still noble and intellectual. Nerva, Hadrian, and Verus, and the Antonines, are still nature's noblemen. To them succeeds, from Severus to Constantine, a type of countenance no longer Roman, no longer provincial, but barbarian merely. Rude and vigorous animals these later Emperors generally were; but they have for the most part lost all intellectual expression, unless it be that of craft and dissimulation. But besides these statues and busts and medals, to which names can be attached, and from which this illustration of recorded history may be drawn, there exists a multitude of similar remains,

utterly ownerless and nameless, which can only be generally described as portraits of the Lower Empire. For the most part these are of the meanest and most commonplace character. They have lost all resemblance to the old Roman type. They are devoid of the beauty of the high-class provincials, even of the animal vigour of the barbarian soldiers. They seem to represent the degenerate, mongrel race which had succeeded to the inheritance of the old families at Rome, engraved with all the skill which in those days money could buy, and so as to satisfy, no doubt, the vanity and the taste of the highest class of Romans under the heel of the barbarian Emperors. The history of the subjection of the Senate to the Emperors, of the choice of the Emperors by the army, of the recruitment of the army from among the barbarians, of the decline of the Roman character and fortunes from the Cæsars downwards, may be read at a glance in the long rows of Roman portraits in the Conservators' Palace at modern Rome.

It was by the deep and active sympathies, by the national feeling of its sons, that the power of Rome had been secured, extended, and upheld for many centuries. This was now past. New ideas demanded a new system. Diocletian, besides his military capacity, had the genius to perceive the great want of the times, and to organize a new constitution accordingly. He perceived that the vast Empire, assailed at so many points at once, required for its protection the presence of the sovereign, of the Imperator in the old Roman sense, the commander of its armies, east, west, north, and south simultaneously. To meet this necessity he devised the plan of dividing the sovereignty among four several chiefs-two superior, to whom he assigned the highest authority, together with the highest title, that of Augusti; two subordinate, but still endowed with substantial local powers, whom he designated as Cæsars. The east was taken by Diocletian himself; the west was assigned to Maximian. Diocletian appointed Galerius his Cæsar; Maximian gave that title and office to Constantius Chlorus, with the direct control of Gaul, Spain, and Britain, and command of the armies which defended the frontier against the Franks, the Saxons, and other German tribes on the Rhine and the North Sea coast.

Such a division could not be peaceful or permanent. It seems to us, after the event, most strange that it could be expected to prove so; but it is hard for us to realize the undoubting faith of the old Roman world in the perpetuity and intrinsic unity of the Empire. The vast body was indeed torn by the

Constantine, of whose career we are about to speak more particularly, was the eldest son of Constantius Chlorus, the Cæsar of the West, by Helena, the Saint Helena of a later date, to whom this Cæsar had first been united when he was himself a simple citizen, but whom he had repudiated for the sake of a second and more splendid alliance with the family of Galerius, the Cæsar of the East. Diocletian had been persuaded, chiefly at the instance of Galerius, to institute a general persecution of the Christians. This persecution the tenth, as it is reputed the most severe but the last of the series, had resulted in a strong reaction of popular sentiment in favour of the Christians themselves. Diocletian had abdicated, wearied and probably mortified at the failure of the policy thus forced upon him by his younger subordinate. Galerius himself eventually, stung by remorse or alarmed at the progress of a fatal illness, retracted the edict he had issued, and assured the Christians of a legal toleration. At this moment Constantine was in the hands of Galerius in the East, detained under specious pretences as a hostage for the loyalty of his father; for Constantius alone of the four chiefs of the Empire had withheld his sanction from the persecution within his own dominions, had continued to show favour to the Christians who were his subjects, and had made himself thereby the personage towards whom alone a notable portion of the population of the Empire in general looked for countenance, for indulgence, and for deliverance.

Our sources of information as to the bare facts and occurrences of this period are scanty, and often liable to question and suspicion. Of the real disposition, the motives, and personal influences which swayed political leaders, we have no certain informa

The motives indeed of this signal conversion have always been the subject of controversy. It may be well, in order to assist us in our estimate of them, to take into consideration the position in which Christianity outwardly stood towards Paganism at this period.

The numerical proportion which the disciples of the new faith bore to the votaries of the old at the beginning of the fourth century has never been even approximately ascertained. The Christian writers, even from an earlier date, had spoken vaguely and rhetorically, and advanced statements which, if they proved anything, would prove a great deal too much. Tertullian, who asserts that if all the faithful were to withdraw from the cities, the fields and the islands, and retire into a country by themselves, they would leave the Roman Empire a frightful solitude: Eusebius, who seemsbut this was after the conversion of Constantine-to regard the Pagans as a mere handful of fanatics in the midst of the multitude of the true believers: must be put out of court by the mere extravagance of their testimony, or confronted with the express admission of Origen, that the proportion of the Christians to the Pagans was but small. In the course of the first century after the establishment of the Church, the election of Bishop Damasus at Rome was attended, as we read, by a vast tumult of his own and his rival's supporters, which kept the whole city in an uproar till it was eventually put down by military force; but it does not appear that these vehement partisans were all even nominally Christians. seems more likely that occasion was seized for a general riot by the whole scum of the population of a great city. Still later, Augustin ventures to declare that the faith was diffused throughout all nations except the people of Rome and still a few of the natives of the West. To him again may

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