he made Christianity the State Religion of the world-wide Roman Empire.
This act and its far-reaching effects, are not all we owe to Constantine, however. It should be remembered that even our creed was to some extent decided by him. For it was this Sun-God worshipper—who, though he advised others to enter what he wished should become a catholic and all-embracing religion, refused to do so himself till he was dying—who called together our bishops, and, presiding over them in council at Nicæa, demanded that they should determine the controversy in the ranks of the Christians as to whether the Christ was or was not God, by subscribing to a declaration of his Deity. It is even recorded that he forced the unwilling ones to sign under penalty off deprivation and banishment.
From these and other incidents in his career it would appear that, either from policy or conviction, Constantine acted as if he thought the Sun-God and the Christ were one and the same deity.
The probability of this is more or less apparent from what we are told concerning the part he played in connection with what, thanks, as we
are about to see, to him, became our recognised symbol.
Our knowledge of the part played by Constantine in connection with the symbol of the cross, except so far as we can gather it from a study of ancient coins and other relics, unfortunately comes to us solely through Christian sources. And the first that famous bishop and ecclesiastical historian Eusebius of Cæsarea, to whom we owe so large a proportion of our real or supposed knowledge of the early days of Christianity, tells us about Constantine and the cross, is that in the year A.C. 312—a quarter of a century before his admission into the Christian Church—Constantine and the Gaulish soldiers he was leading saw at noon over the Sun a cross of Light in the heavens, bearing upon it or having attached to it the inscription ΕΝ ΤΟΥΤΩ ΝΙΝΑ, By this conquer.
The words of the Bishop, who is reporting what he states the Emperor in question to have told him personally, are:—
"He said that at mid-day when the sun was beginning to decline he saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the Sun, bearing the inscription ΕΝ ΤΟΥΤΩ ΝΙΝΑ; he himself, and his
whole army also, being struck with amazement at this sight."[33]
Though this marvellous cross, declared by Christian writers of that century to have been the so-called Monogram of Christ
