The Roman policy also viewed with the utmost jealousy and distrust any association among its subjects, and the secret and nocturnal meetings of the Christians appeared peculiarly dangerous in the eyes of the law.
They were oppressed by the Emperor Domitian. Trajan protected their meetings by requiring definite evidence of these illegal assemblies, and an informer who failed in his proofs was subject to a severe or capital penalty. But the edicts of Hadrian and Antoninus Pius protected the Church from the danger of popular clamour in times of disaster, declaring that the voice of the multitude should never be admitted as legal evidence to convict or to punish those unfortunate persons who had embraced the enthusiasm of the Christians.
The authority of Origen and Dionysius annihilates that formidable army of martyrs, whose relics, drawn for the most part from the catacombs of Rome, have replenished so many churches, and whose marvellous achievements have been the subject of so many volumes of holy romance.
The martyrdom of Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, on September 14, 258, was one of the most notable of that period. Under Marcus Antoninus, the Christians were treated harshly, but the tyrant Commodus protected them by his leniency. After a temporary period of persecution during the reign of Severus, the Christians enjoyed a calm from 211 to 249. The storms gathered again under Decius, and so vigorous was the persecution that the bishops of the most considerable cities were removed by exile or death.
III.--The Church under Constantine
From 284 to 303, during the reign of Diocletian, the Christian Church enjoyed peace and prosperity, but in the latter year Galerius persuaded the emperor to renew the persecution of the sect. An edict on February 24 enacted that all churches throughout the empire should be demolished, and the punishment of death was pronounced against all who should presume to hold any secret assemblies for the purposes of religious worship. Many suffered martyrdom under this cruel enactment. Churches everywhere were burnt, and sacred books destroyed. Three more edicts published before March 304 led to the imprisonment of all persons of the ecclesiastical order, compelled the magistrates to exercise torture to subvert the religion of their Christian prisoners, and made it the duty, as well as the interest, of the imperial officers to discover, to pursue, and to torment the most obnoxious among the faithful.
But after six years of persecution, the mind of Galerius, softened by salutary reflection, induced him to attempt some reparation. In the edict of toleration which he published on April 30, 311, he expresses the hope "that our indulgence will engage the Christians to offer up their prayers to the Deity whom they adore for our safety and prosperity, and for that of the Republic."
The triumph of the great Constantine established the security of the Christian Church from the attacks of the pagans. Converted in 306, Constantine, as soon as he had achieved the conquest of Italy, issued the Edict of Milan (313), declaring that the places of worship which had been confiscated should be restored to the Church without dispute, without delay, and without expense. Though himself never received by baptism into the Church, until his last moments, his powerful patronage of the Christians, and his edicts of toleration, removed all the temporal disadvantages which had hitherto retarded the progress of Christianity.
The faith of Christ became the national religion of the empire. The soldiers bore upon their helmets and upon their shields the sacred emblem of the Cross. All the machinery of government was employed to propagate the faith, not only within the empire, but beyond its borders. Confirmed in his new religion by the miraculous vision of the Cross, Constantine, who was the master of the world, consented to recognise the superiority of the ecclesiastical orders in all spiritual matters, while retaining himself the temporal power.
The persecution of heresy was carried out by Constantine with all the ardour of a convert. An edict confiscated the public property of the heretics to the use either of the revenue or the Catholic Church, and the penal regulations of Diocletian against the Christians were now employed against the schismatics. The Donatists, who maintained the apostolic succession of Donatus, primate of Carthage, as opposed to Cæcilian, were suppressed in Africa, and a general synod attempted to regulate the faith of the Church.