such dissimulation as was natural to his "perfidious character," he would be sure to throw off the mask at the first opportunity, and make these troublesome Christians feel that he would do them all the mischief in his power.

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The time at which he began to harass them has not been distinctly ascertained. Jerome fixes one chief act of oppressiveness as late as the year 320; and Tillemont acquiesces in that date. For some time, no doubt, Licinius was cautious in his operations, and this would suggest a longer interval between the treaty of 314 and the attacks on his Christian subjects than Sozomen's language appears to allow. He seems to have felt somewhat as the French republicans felt towards the French clericals," considered as hoping for a restoration of royalty; for he suspected that the Christians prayed in their churches to be brought under the sway of Constantine; and this would lead him to direct his first movement against the rulers of the Churches, who on other grounds, also, would be naturally the first to feel his hatred. On the whole it seems likely that at some time between 315 and 320 he began by prohibiting the bishops "to have any intercourse, in any place, with one another," to visit each other's churches, "or to hold synods and debates on matters of interest to the Church." So true was his instinct as to the value of such meetings to the good order and healthy life of the community which he had set himself to oppress, and ultimately, if possible, to destroy. He set the precedent which many a government has, since his time, thought good to follow by putting a legal impediment in the course of the Church's synodical action. It is as well that we should appreciate the full significance of his first hostile edict; and perhaps, among the many who quote the sensitive and despondent Nazianzen's avowal that he never saw a synod which did not add to the Church's troubles-an avowal followed by words (not so often quoted) which show that he deemed "seclusion" the only safeguard-there are few who remember or consider that the first regular law against Church Councils was the first step in a crafty and malignant tyrant's elaborate campaign against Church life, and drew forth from the somewhat "liberal" Eusebius the momentous observation, that men were compelled either to resist the State's command, or to violate the Church's "ordinances, for great questions cannot be rightly decided otherwise than by synods."

Such was the first edict of Licinius. The second and third

were respectively embittered by an insult which recalled the obsolete and hideous heathen libels against the Church, and by a sarcasm in the style of Julian or of Frederick of Prussia. Licinius ordered, as if in the interests of morality, that Christian women should not go to church with the men, but worship apart under female teachers; and, this edict failing of success, he further directed, as if in the interests of health, that Christian congregations should assemble, not within their towns, but in the open space outside the gates, because the air there would be purer! It was, perhaps, after both these mandates had been treated with scorn, that Licinius ejected all his Christian servants from their situations in his household; and drove into exile, simply for their faith, men who had been most loyal to his person. Some others were mulcted of their property, or condemned to base and servile employments in the mines or other public works-a form of humiliating ill-treatment which had been one of the milder features of the great persecution, and has left its memory in the long detailed intercession in the Alexandrian Liturgy commonly called St. Mark's. By this time-in 320, according to Jerome's date, in his Chronicle, for the dismissal of Licinius's Christian servants -the hearts of those who, but six or seven years before, had been overflowing with the joy of final deliverance from heathen persecutors were now sobered and saddened by the prospect of fresh inflictions close at hand. They saw some of their brethren driven to seek shelter in the wilderness, and others cast into prison, where their friends were debarred from bringing them food or otherwise ministering to their necessity. They saw a fresh edict go forth, which must have thrilled them with the recollection of the fiery trial of Diocletian's reign, and of the yet worse days that followed it : all military officers who would not sacrifice to the gods were to be deprived of their rank in the Emperor's service. As if to complete the likeness of the new troubles to the old, churches were pulled down, or shut up with a prohibition against the Christians' use of them; every facility was given to local officials to insult and annoy Christian bishops. At last the instruments of Licinius, acting on their own assumption as to their master's secret wishes, proceeded to extremities, and in several cases to the ghastliest forms of cruelty. Eusebius speaks of some who were literally cut to pieces, and afterwards cast into the sea, "to become food for fishes." One of the bishops who suffered death was, by one account, Basil of Amasea, who had sat in the Ancyran and Neocæsarean Councils.

The bishop of another Neocæsarea, situated on the Euphrates, was treated in a manner thus described by Theodoret, who mentions him as a member of the Nicene Council. "Paul, the bishop of Neocæsarea (it is a stronghold on the banks of the Euphrates), experienced the wild rage of Licinius, for both his hands were disabled by the application of red-hot iron, which contracted and deadened the muscles of the joints." But one story of Christian endurance, connected with this local and partial, but bitter and trying persecution, is pre-eminently famous: it is the story of the Forty soldier-Martyrs of Sebaste, who, according to a tradition received by St. Basil, but, as we might expect, betraying the growth of exaggeration, refused to sacrifice to the gods, and were thereupon exposed naked to the piercing cold of a winter's night, being informed at the same time that by promising compliance they might at any moment have access to a hot bath. The pathetic interest of the tale lies in this, that one of them, after a while, accepted these terms; whereupon the soldier who acted as guard, under a sudden inspiration, took his place among the sufferers, whose prayer that "as forty had entered on the contest, so forty might win the crown," was thus fulfilled.

Licinius, throughout, avoided the position of an avowed religious persecutor. He oppressed the Christians because he chose to consider them disaffected and politically dangerous; but he did not proscribe their religion as such. Yet oppression is a test of character; and, limited as was the extent to which Licinius was permitted to vex the Church, before his plans were defeated by his second and fatal war with Constantine, there were in this period melancholy cases of weakness and of faithlessness, as when some yielded, in the words of the Nicene Council, "without any compulsion, danger, or loss of property," and some military officers, who had at first cheerfully laid aside their "belts" rather than satisfy the Emperor by sacrificing, soon afterwards "spent money, and won their readmission to the army by presents:" not to speak of the charge afterwards made by Constantine himself against one who was more than once his worst adviser, Eusebius of Nicomedia, that he, a bishop, had not only taken part with Licinius against Constantine, but had been accomplice in his “butcheries of true bishops "-a charge which it is impossible to admit as it stands, but which may have been founded on some instance of this prelate's habitual preference of secular interests to Christian fidelity. The days of trial passed by, perhaps, before either the

faithful or the faithless could fully estimate their prospects under Licinius. He was, we are told, "meditating a general persecution" when Constantine, in 323, made war upon him-for other reasons, doubtless, beside that which Eusebius mentions, his sympathy for the suffering Christians of the East. The end of that year saw the ruin of Licinius's cause; the next year saw his name added by Christians to the list of their dead foes. It was given out that, after accepting terms, he began secretly to plot against the victor; but such charges were pretty sure to be made against a defeated rival whose life had been guaranteed by a promise. He was put to death at Thessalonica in 324; and this final victory of the imperial friend of the Church and its ministers was naturally accompanied by a more open and emphatic association of Christian ideas and purposes with his personal and official life. The half-superstitious impression of a supreme Divine protection, attaching itself to all who took the Cross of Christ for their saving sign," had by this time been evidently deepened, and, so to say, transformed into a truer and fuller recognition of the unearthly kingdom which that Cross represented; a conviction still far removed from single-hearted and unreserved self-devotion, and compatible not only with delay of baptism, and with official retention of some heathen forms-as the imperial title of Pontifex Maximus, or the celebration of "games" which were mixed with heathen rites-but with not a little of non-Christianity in tone and character, which Niebuhr was thinking of when he pronounced the well-known judgment, too epigrammatic to be equitable, "A repulsive phenomenon, and no Christian!" No Christian, we must indeed say, if the term be taken in its proper sense of one living under Christian grace, and swayed by Christian principle, or in the sense of one who, though not yet within the baptismal covenant, had resolved to commit himself absolutely to Christ, or had found a home and stay for heart and conscience in the spiritual depths and moral forces of Christianity. Not such was Constantine, either now or in later years of his strange life, when in some respects his character underwent a grave deterioration, as in the domestic tragedy of the execution of his son Crispus. Yet it would be unfair not to credit him, at this period, with some measure of what might be called Christian faith, sincere up to a point, although poor in tone, and far enough from being a liferenewing power; with a genuine appreciation of the Christian moral standard, and with a large-minded perception of the need of

a spiritual support for social order-of what an Emperor might gain from having a Church. For he was a man of great ideas; he knew a great thing when he saw it; and he appreciated the greatness of the Christian religion, as organized in a universal Church. He was impressed by the strange force which had carried it through many a fiery trial, by the new strength which it had given to the principle of moral authority, by its capacity for becoming a civil as well as a spiritual bond of union. And when we take account of his glaring inconsistencies, we must remember how many persons in that transition-time held partial relations with the Church of Christ, and were actually, to a certain extent, Christianized; and how Constantine, belonging to that class, was specially impeded in his advance to higher things by the difficulties of a position such as no other monarch ever occupied, and which must never be lost sight of in any estimate of his conduct. So, when we turn with some disgust from Eusebius's fulsome eulogies on the piety of a prince who delivered sermons to his court, and tried to pronounce on Christian controversies, without having as much as given in his name as a catechumen-when we justly consider that in this respect the courtly Church historian exhibited himself as somewhat lacking in moral dignity, and set a mischievous precedent for clerical obsequiousness-we must still, in all fairness, make large allowance for the dazzling fascination of such a phenomenon as an Augustus who did not simply tolerate the Christian religion, but spoke of it in terms of increasing cordiality and respect, heaped substantial favours on its official representatives, even espoused the side of Catholics against schismatics, and generally set himself to promote the advancement of the Christian cause. If he assumed, as he repeatedly did, the tone of a "patron" of the Church long before he became one of its members, he partly drifted by force of circumstances into that position, and was partly led into it by ecclesiastics whose heads, so to speak, had been somewhat turned by an astonishing experience. As to his enactments, he had abolished the punishment of crucifixion two years after the first war with Licinius. He had, so to say, transformed the ceremony of manumission of slaves into a quasi-Christian act, in all cases affecting Christian slave-holders, by allowing it to be performed in churches, "in the presence of the prelates of the Christians," and, in that case, with some abridgment of legal forms. It was not going beyond the line of heathen emperors to forbid, as in 319 he had