The bigot must have been brought very low and reduced to the last depths of despair before he set his seal to such a document as this. One can see that it was drawn up by Maximin with a copy of the Edict of Milan before him, and that he hoped, by this tardy and clumsy recognition of the principle of absolute liberty of conscience for all men, to make the Christians forget his brutalities. Doubtless, the Christians of Cilicia and Syria looked to Constantine in far off Gaul as a model prince and emperor, and heard with joy of the steady advance of Constantine’s ally, Licinius. The latter would come in their eyes in the guise of a liberator, and prayers for his success would be offered up in every Christian church of the persecuted East. Maximin sought to repurchase their loyalty: it was too late. His absurd pretext that his orders had been misunderstood by his provincial governors would deceive no one. He had been the shrewdest enemy with whom the Church had had to cope; his edict of recantation was read with chilly suspicion or cold contempt, which was changed into hymns of rejoicing when the Christians heard that the tyrant had poisoned himself and died in agony, while his conqueror, Licinius, had drowned the fallen Empress in the Orontes and put to death her children, a boy of eight and a girl of seven. Those who had suffered persecution for ten years may be pardoned their exultation that there was no one left alive to perpetuate the names of their persecutors.[[72]]
Throughout this time the West had escaped very lightly. Even Maxentius had begun his reign by seeking to secure the good-will of the Christians. Eusebius, indeed, makes the incredible statement[[73]] that in order to please and flatter the Roman people he pretended to embrace the Christian faith and “assumed the mask of piety.” Probably all he did was to leave the Christians of Rome in peace. The chair of St. Peter had remained empty for four years after the death of Bishop Marcellinus. In 308 Marcellus was elected to fill it and the Church was organised afresh. But it was rent with internal dissensions. There was a large section which insisted that the brethren who had been found weak during the recent persecution should be received back into the fold without penance and reproach. Marcellus stood out for discipline; the quarrel became so exacerbated that Maxentius exiled the Bishop, who shortly afterwards died. A priest named Eusebius was then chosen Pontiff, but the schismatics elected a Pontiff of their own, Heraclius by name, and the rival partisans quarrelled and fought in the streets. Maxentius, with strict impartiality, exiled both. The record of this schism is preserved in the curious epitaph composed by Pope Damasus for the tomb of Eusebius:
“Heraclius forbade the lapsed to bewail their sins; Eusebius taught them to repent and weep for their wrong-doing. The people were divided into factions, raging and furious: then came sedition, bloodshed, war, discord, strife.[[74]] Forthwith both were driven away by the cruelty of the tyrant. While the Bishop preserved intact the bonds of peace, he endured his exile gladly on the Trinacrian shores, knowing that God was his judge, and so passed from this world and from life.”
On the confession of Damasus himself, the state of the Roman Church warranted the interference of Maxentius if it resulted in “sedition, bloodshed, war, discord, and strife,” and the “cruelty of the tyrant” in this particular case is not proven. Eusebius died in Sicily in 310; in the following year Miltiades was elected Bishop, and Maxentius restored to the Roman Christians their churches and cemeteries, which for eight years had been in the hands of the civil authorities.
The overthrow of Maxentius by Constantine, the destruction of Maximin by Licinius, the publication of the Edict of Milan, and the apparent sincerity of the two Emperors in their anxiety to restore peace and security, were naturally hailed by the Christians throughout the Empire with the liveliest joy. On every side stately churches began to rise from the ground, and as the triumph of Christianity over its enemies was incontestable, converts came flocking in by the thousand to receive what Eusebius calls “the mysterious signs of the Saviour’s Passion.” The only troublers of the Church were members of the Church herself, like the extravagant Donatists in Africa. The canons of the Council of Ancyra, which was held soon after the death of Maximin, shew how the ecclesiastical authorities imposed varying penances upon those who had shrunk from their duty as soldiers of Christ in the recent persecution, varying, that is to say, according to the extent of their shortcomings. Some had apostatised and themselves turned persecutors; some had sacrificed at the first command; some had endured prison, but had shrunk from torture; some had suffered torture, but quailed before the stake; some had bribed the executioners only to make a show of torturing them; some had attended the sacrificial feasts, but had substituted other meats. The punishments range from ten years of probation and every degree of penance, down to a few months’ deprivation of the comforts and communions of the Church.
New dangers, however, speedily threatened. Constantine and Licinius quarrelled between themselves and, after two stubborn battles, agreed upon a fresh division of the world. For eight years, from 315 to 323, this partition lasted, but, as the Emperors again drifted apart, Licinius became more and more anti-Christian. His rivalry with Constantine accounts for the change. Licinius suspected Constantine of intriguing with his Christian subjects just as Constantine regarded the pagan element in his own provinces as the natural focus of disaffection against his rule. Licinius had no definite Christian beliefs; he had been the friend and nominee of Galerius; and, like Galerius, he never got rid of the suspicion that the Christian assemblies were a danger to the public security. The Christians had aided him against Maximin: he thought they would do the same for Constantine against himself. Eusebius[[75]] likens him to a twisted snake, wriggling along and concealing its poisoned fangs, not daring to attack the Church openly for fear of Constantine, but dealing it constant and insidious blows.
The simile was well chosen. Licinius seems to have opened his campaign against the Christians by forbidding the bishops in his provinces to leave their dioceses and take part in their usual synods and councils. They were to remain at home, he said, and mind their own business and not plot treason against their Emperor under the pretext of perfecting the discipline of the Church. Another edict, which came with poor grace from a man whose own excesses were notorious, forbade Christian men and women to meet for common worship in their churches: they were to worship apart, so that their morals might not be exposed to danger. On the same pretext, bishops and priests were only allowed to give teaching and consolation to their own sex; Christian women must find women teachers and advisers. Eusebius tells us[[76]] that these edicts excited universal ridicule. It was too late to revive the old stories of gross immorality taking place at the communion services, and there was fresh cause for mocking laughter when Licinius forbade the Christians to assemble in their churches within the towns and ordered them to go outside the gates and meet, if they must meet, in the open air. This was necessary, he said, on the grounds of public health; the atmosphere beyond the gates was purer. Licinius’s theory of hygiene was perfectly sound; its application was ludicrous.
These were the first steps leading, as his subjects must have known only too well, straight to persecution. After a time Licinius threw over bodily the Edict of Milan. He purged his court and his army in the old way. The choice was sacrifice or dismissal, and some pretext was usually made to tack on to official dismissal a confiscation of goods. Licinius, says Eusebius, thirsted for gold like a very Tantalus. Aurelius Victor says[[77]] he had all the mean, sordid avarice of a peasant. And the Christians, of course, were fair game. He pillaged their churches, robbed them of their goods, sentenced them to exile and to the mines, or ruined them just as effectually by insisting on their becoming magistrates. Bloodshed followed, and Licinius aimed his severest blows at the bishops. He accused them of omitting his name in their prayers for the welfare of the Emperor and the State, though they carefully remembered that of Constantine; and, if none were actually put to death, many suffered imprisonment, torture, and mutilation. The story of the martyrs and confessors in the Licinian persecution is very like that of those who suffered under Diocletian and Maximin. But the fate of the forty soldier martyrs of the Twelfth Legion (Fulminata) deserves special mention. They had refused to sacrifice, and, by order of their general, were stripped naked and ordered to remain throughout a winter’s night upon a frozen pond, exposed to the elements. At the side of the pond was a building, where the water for the town baths was heated. Apparently no guard was kept. The martyrs were free to make their way to the warmth and shelter if they wished it, but only at the price of apostasy. One of them, after enduring bravely for many hours, crawled towards the warmth, but died of exhaustion as soon as he had crossed the threshold. The sight so affected the pagan attendant of the bath that he flung off his clothes in uncontrollable emotion, and with the shout, “I too am a Christian,” took the place of the weak brother who had just lost the martyr’s crown. In the morning the forty were found dead and their bodies were burnt at the stake. It was said that one of them was found to be still breathing, and the executioners put him apart from the rest. His mother, afraid lest he should miss entering heaven by the side of his brave companions in glory, herself placed him in the cart to be borne to the stake.
Another moving story of the Licinian persecution is that of Gordius of Cæsarea, in Cappadocia. He had fled from his home to live the life of a hermit among the mountains, when suddenly an impulse came upon him to return and testify to the truth. The people were all assembled in the Circus, intent upon some public spectacle, when an uncouth figure was seen to move slowly down the marble steps and then pass out into the centre of the arena. A hush fell upon the multitude, as the hermit was recognised and dragged before the tribunal of the Governor. “I have come,” he said, “to shew how little I think of your edicts and to confess my faith in Jesus Christ, and I have chosen this moment, O Governor, because I know your cruelty, which surpasses that of all other men.” They put him to the torture: he delighted in his pain. “The more you torture me,” he said, “the greater will be my reward. There is a bargain between God and us. Each pang and torment that we suffer here will be rewarded there by increased glory and happiness.”
Licinius had thus, like Maximin, made himself the champion of the old religion and the religious reactionaries. When in 323 war again broke out between himself and Constantine, it was as the professed enemy of Christianity and its God that he took the field. The war was a war of ambition on both sides, but it was also a war between the two religions. We have mentioned elsewhere the oath which Licinius took before the battle, when he vowed that if the gods gave him the victory he would extirpate root and branch the Christian religion. Fate gave him no opportunity to fulfil his promise. Defeated at Adrianople and at Chrysopolis, and then exiled to Thessalonica, Licinius had not many months to live. Before he died he saw his pagan councillors pay for their folly with their lives and heard the rejoicings of the Christians of the East at the fall of the last of their pagan persecutors. The Church at last had won her freedom and was to suffer at the hands of the State no more. Eusebius has fortunately preserved for us the text of the edict addressed by Constantine after his victory to the inhabitants of Palestine, recalling from exile, from the mines, and from servitude the Christian victims of the recent persecution, restoring their property to those who had suffered confiscation, offering to soldiers who had been expelled in disgrace from the army either a return to their old rank or the certificate of honourable discharge, and giving back to the churches without diminution the corporate possessions of which they had been robbed. Constantine not merely passed the sponge over the administrative acts of Licinius: he granted large subsidies to the bishops who had suffered at the hands of “the dragon,” and himself wrote to “his dearest beloved brother,” Eusebius of Cæsarea, urging him to see that the bishops, elders, and deacons in his neighbourhood were “active and enthusiastic in the work of the Church.”[[78]]