out of our way to claim as a Christian one who refused to enter the Christian Church till he was dying and possibly no longer master of himself.
It is said that this refusal of his to be baptised till he was weak and dying and surrounded by Church officials who would perhaps have spread the report that he had been baptised even if they had not then at last been able to induce him to take the decisive step, was due, not to want of belief, but to excess of belief; Constantine's idea being that the longer he put off the rite in question, the more crimes would it wash out. Or, in other words, that delay would enable him to sin with impunity a little longer.
This may possibly have been the case, but it should at the same time be borne in mind that whether Constantine called him Apollo or Christ, it seems probable that it was the Sun-God to whom he referred. For everything tends to show that this astute emperor, who so naturally wished to establish and mould a religion which all his subjects of whatever race or nationality might be reasonably expected to become in time willing to accept, acted during his reign as supreme ruler of the Roman World, if not from first to last, as if the Christ were but another
conception of the Sun-God he was brought up to worship as Apollo and all countries venerated under some name or other.
This point is not only demonstrated by the fact that upon his coins Constantine repeatedly declared that the Sun-God was his invincible guide and protector and the giver even of the victory foreshadowed by the alleged vision of the cross or Monogram of Christ above the meridian sun, but is also clearly shown by certain incidents connected with the founding towards the end of his life of the new metropolis which in less than a century equalled Rome in all save antiquity.
New Rome, or, as we now call it, Constantinople, the city of Constantine, was built on the site of, and often called by the name of, Byzantium. It was not designed till A.C. 324, and was not dedicated till A.C. 330, or, as some think, an even later date: Constantine dying in the year A.C. 337.
We are told that Constantinople was dedicated to the Virgin Mother of God.[45] This should remind us of the fact that long before our era,
and right down to the time when Constantine selected Byzantium as the site of a new capital, that place was considered dedicated to the Virgin Queen of Heaven.
Now in the central place of honour in his new metropolis, one would naturally expect Constantine to erect something or other to the honour of the God to whom he attributed his victories.
Whose, then, was the statue Constantine towards the end of his life, and about twenty years after his alleged conversion to our faith, erected in the centre of the Forum of New Rome?