CHAPTER X.
CONSTANTINE THE GREAT.
A.D. 313-337.
It was a great thing for the Church that the emperor of Rome should give it liberty; and Constantine, after sending forth the laws which put an end to the persecution, went on to make other laws in favour of the Christians. But he did not himself become a Christian all at once, although he built many churches, and gave rich presents to others, and although he was fond of keeping company with bishops, and of conversing with them about religion. Licinius, the emperor of the East, who had joined with Constantine in his first laws, afterwards quarrelled with him, and persecuted the eastern Christians cruelly. But Constantine defeated him in battle (A.D. 324), and the whole empire was once more united under one head.
After his victory over Licinius, Constantine declared himself a Christian, which he had not done before; and he used to attend the services of the Church very regularly, and to stand all the time that the bishops were preaching, however long their sermons might be. He used even himself to write a kind of discourses something like sermons, and to read them aloud in the palace to all his court; but he really knew very little of Christian doctrine, although he was very fond of taking part in disputes about it. And, although he professed to be a Christian, he had not yet been made a member of Christ by baptism; for, in those days, people had so high a notion of the grace of baptism, that many of them put off their baptism until they supposed that they were on their death-bed, for fear lest they should sin after being baptized, and so should lose the benefit of the sacrament. This was of course wrong; for it was a sad mistake to think that they might go on in sin so long as they were not baptized. God, we know, might have cut them off at any moment in the midst of all their sins; and even if they were spared, there was a great danger that, when they came to beg for baptism at last, they might not have that true spirit of repentance and faith without which they could not be fit to receive the grace of the sacrament. And therefore the teachers of the Church used to warn people against putting off their baptism out of a love for sin; and when any one had received clinical baptism, as it was called (that is to say, baptism on a sick-bed), if he afterwards got well again, he was thought but little of in the Church.
But to come back to Constantine. He had many other faults besides his unwillingness to take on himself the duties of a baptized Christian; and, although we are bound to thank God for having turned his heart to favour the Church, we must not be blind to the emperor's faults. Yet, with all these faults, he really believed the Gospel, and meant to do what he could for the truth.
It took a long time to put down heathenism; for it would not have been safe or wise to force people to become Christians before they had come to see the falsehood of their old religion. Constantine, therefore, only made laws against some of its worst practices, and forbade any sacrifices to be offered in the name of the empire; but he did not hinder the heathens from sacrificing on their own account if they liked.
Soon after professing himself a Christian, the emperor began to build a new capital in the East. There had been a town called Byzantium on the spot before; but the new city was far grander, and he gave it the name of Constantinople, which means the City of Constantine. It was meant to be altogether Christian,—unlike Rome, which was full of temples of heathen gods. And the emperors, from this time, usually lived at Constantinople, or at some other place in the East.
There will be more to say about Constantine in the next chapter. In the mean time, let us look at the progress of the Gospel.