Some day we shall possess an International Board of Revisioning Historians before whom all emperors, kings, pontiffs, presidents and mayors who now enjoy the title of the “great” shall have to submit their claims for this specific qualification. One of the candidates who will have to be watched very carefully when he appears before this tribunal is the aforementioned Emperor Constantine.
This wild Serbian who had wielded a spear on every battle field of Europe, from York in England to Byzantium on the shores of the Bosphorus, was among other things the murderer of his wife, the murderer of his brother-in-law, the murderer of his nephew (a boy of seven) and the executioner of several other relatives of minor degree and importance. Nevertheless and notwithstanding, because in a moment of panic just before he marched against his most dangerous rival, Maxentius, he had made a bold bid for Christian support, he gained great fame as the “second Moses” and was ultimately elevated to sainthood both by the Armenian and by the Russian churches. That he lived and died a barbarian who had outwardly accepted Christianity, yet until the end of his days tried to read the riddle of the future from the steaming entrails of sacrificial sheep, all this was most considerately overlooked in view of the famous Edict of Tolerance by which the Emperor guaranteed unto his beloved Christian subjects the right to “freely profess their private opinions and to assemble in their meeting place without fear of molestation.”
For the leaders of the Church in the first half of the fourth century, as I have repeatedly stated before, were practical politicians and when they had finally forced the Emperor to sign this ever memorable decree, they elevated Christianity from the rank of a minor sect to the dignity of the official church of the state. But they knew how and in what manner this had been accomplished and the successors of Constantine knew it, and although they tried to cover it up by a display of oratorical fireworks the arrangement never quite lost its original character.
“Deliver me, oh mighty ruler,” exclaimed Nestor the Patriarch unto Theodosius the Emperor, “deliver me of all the enemies of my church and in return I will give thee Heaven. Stand by me in putting down those who disagree with our doctrines and we in turn will stand by thee in putting down thine enemies.”
There have been other bargains during the history of the last twenty centuries.
But few have been so brazen as the compromise by which Christianity came to power.
CHAPTER V
IMPRISONMENT
Just before the curtain rings down for the last time upon the ancient world, a figure crosses the stage which had deserved a better fate than an untimely death and the unflattering appellation of “the Apostate.”