“Whoever shall conceal any thing which Arius has written,instead of delivering it up to be burned, shall be put to death immediately upon being taken.”
Conversions from paganism were becoming frequent and numerous. Under the fostering care of the emperor, churches rose all over the land.
A tragic event in the life of this extraordinary man deserves record. His second wife was a beautiful woman named Fausta, much younger than himself. She was about the age of the emperor’s very handsome son Crispus. Fausta fell in love with the young man. Virtuously he repelled her advances. It is written,—
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
Fausta rushed to Constantine, and accused Crispus of atrocious crime. The imperial father, in the frenzy of his rage, ordered his innocent son to be led instantly to execution. His headless body was hardly in the tomb ere the truth of his wife’s guilt and his son’s innocence was made known to the unhappy emperor beyond all possibility of doubt. In the delirium of his anguish, he ordered Fausta to be drowned in her bath.
Henceforward, for Constantine, life was but a dismal day. He never recovered from the gloom of these events; and it is said that he was never known to smile again. For forty days he fasted, weeping and groaning, and denying himself all comforts. He erected a golden statue to Crispus, with this simple, pathetic inscription:—
“TO MY SON, WHOM I UNJUSTLY CONDEMNED.”
The conversion of Constantine to Christianity was at first intellectual only, not the regeneration of the heart. He was a nominal Christian, believing in Christ. Still there is no evidence that he had been born again of the Holy Spirit, or that he had accepted Christ as his personal, atoning Saviour. The cares and sorrows of life tend to lead every thoughtful mind to Jesus. Constantine had become a world-weary, heart-broken old man, sixty-four years of age. Rapidly-increasing infirmities admonished him that he must soon appear beforethe judgment-seat of Christ,—before that Saviour whose authority his intellect had been constrained to recognize, but to whom, as yet, he had not fully surrendered his heart.
Deeply depressed in spirits, and sinking beneath his maladies, he retired to some warm springs in Asia. Death was slowly but steadily approaching. Constantine repaired to the church, and with tears and prayers, and deep searchings of soul, sought preparation to meet God. Having obtained, as he thought, assurance that his sins were forgiven, he assembled all the bishops of the neighboring churches in his palace, near the city of Nicomedia, and, with as much publicity as could be exercised without ostentation, confessed his Saviour before men, received the rite of baptism, and the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.
Eusebius, the renowned Bishop of Nicomedia, performed the rite of baptism, and administered the sacred elements. It is to the pen of this illustrious bishop that we are indebted for most of the incidents in relation to the religious history of Constantine. From this time until his death, which occurred soon after, he seemed to live as a sincere and devout follower of the Redeemer. Eusebius says, “Constantine, on receiving baptism, determined to govern himself henceforth, in the minutest particulars, by God’s worthy laws of life.”