[Footnote A: Ibid.]
Referring to the long reign of peace in the closing decades of the third century, Milner says:
This new [the toleration of Christianity by a pagan government] did not prove favorable to the growth of grave and holiness. In no period since the Apostles was there ever so great a general decay as in this. Not even in particular instances can we discover during this interval much of lively Christianity.[A]
[Footnote A: Milner's Ch. Hist., vol. I, cent, iii, ch. xvii.]
Here I drop Milner to take up Eusebius, who was an eyewitness of the moral declension among the Christians previous to the last great pagan persecution under the emperor Diocletian. Referring to the long period of peace which the Church had enjoyed—a period of forty years—he says:
But when, by reason of excessive liberty, we sunk into negligence and sloth, one envying and reviling another in different ways, and we were almost, as it were, upon the point of taking up arms against each other with words as with darts and spears, prelates inveighing against prelates, and people rising up against people, and hypocrisy and dissimulation had risen to the greatest height of malignity, then the divine judgment, which usually proceeds with a lenient hand, whilst the multitude were yet crowding into the Church, with gentle and mild visitations began to afflict the episcopacy; the persecution having begun with those brthren in the army. But as if destitute of all sensibility, we were not prompt in measures to appease and propitiate the Deity; some inded like atheists, regarding our situation as unheeded and unobserved by a Providence, we added one wickedness and misery to another. But some that appeared to be our pastors deserting the law of piety, were inflamed against each other with mutual strifes, only accumulating quarrels and threats, rivalship, hostility and hatred to each other, only anxious to assert the government as a kind of sovereignty for themselves.[A]
[Footnote A: Eusebius' Eccl. Hist., bk. viii, ch. i.]
Here I shall avail myself of some reflections upon this condition which I have elsewhere expressed:[A] Let it be remembered that what is said in the foregoing quotation is from a writer contemporary with the events, and who says, in the very chapter following the one from which I have just quoted, that it was not for him to record the dissensions and follies which the shepherds of the people exercised against each other before the persecution. He also adds: "We shall not make mention of those that were shaken by the persecution, nor of those that suffered shipwreck in their salvation, and of their own accord were sunk in the depths of the watery gulf."[B] Then in his Book of Martyrs, referring to events that occurred between the edicts ordering the persecution, he says: "But the events that occurred in the intermediate times, besides those already related. I have thought proper to pass by; I mean more particularly the circumstances of the different heads of the churches, who from being shepherds of the reasonable flocks of Christ, that did not govern in a lawful and becoming manner, were condemned, by divine justice, as unworthy of such a charge, to be the keepers of the unreasonable camel, an animal deformed in the structure of his body: and condemned further to be the keepers of the imperial horses. * * * * * Moreover, the ambitious aspirings of many to office, and the injudicious and unlawful ordinations that took place, the divisions among the confessors themselves, the great schisms and difficulties industriously fomented by the factions among the new members, against the relics of the Church, devising one innovation after another, and unmercifully thrusting them into the midst of all these calamities, heaping up affliction upon affliction. All this, I say, I have resolved to pass by, judging it foreign to my purpose, wishing, as I said in the beginning, to shun and avoid giving an account of them."[C] Hence, however bad the condition of the Church is represented to be by ecclesiastical writers, we must know that it was still worse than that; however numerous the schisms, however unholy the ambition of aspiring prelates, however frequent and serious the innovations upon the primitive ordinances of the Gospel; howsoever great the confusion and apostasy in the Church is represented to be, we must know that it is still worse than that, since the Church historians contemporaneous with the events refused to record these things in their fullness, lest it should prove disastrous to the Church; just as some of our modern scholars, professing to write Church history, express their determination to close their eyes to the corruption and abuses which form the greater part of the melancholy story of ecclesiastical history, for fear that relating these things would make it appear that real religion scarcely had any existence.[D]
[Footnote A: New Witness for God, pp. 75, 76.]
[Footnote B: Eusebius' Eccl. Hist., bk. viii, ch. ii.]