CHAPTER III

HOW GOD HONOURS PIOUS PRINCES, BUT DESTROYS TYRANTS

AND whereas He has given assurance that those who glorify and honour Him will meet with an ample recompense at His hands, while those who set themselves against Him as enemies and adversaries will compass the ruin of their own souls; already has He established the truth of these His own declarations. He has shown that the lives of those tyrants who denied and opposed Him have had a fearful end, and at the same time has made it manifest that even the death of His servant, as well as his life, is worthy of admiration and praise, and justly claims the memorial, not merely of perishable, but of immortal records.

Mankind have indeed devised some consolation for the frail and precarious duration of human life, and have thought by the erection of monuments to secure immortal honours to the memory of their ancestors. Some have employed the vivid delineations and colours of painting; some have carved statues from lifeless blocks of wood; while others, by engraving their inscriptions deep on tablets and monuments of wood and stone, have sought to keep the virtues of those whom they honoured in perpetual remembrance. All these indeed are perishable, and consumed by the lapse of time, being representations of the corruptible body, and incapable of expressing the image of the immortal soul. And yet these seemed sufficient to those who had no well-grounded hope of happiness after the termination of this mortal life. But God, that God, I say, who is the Preserver of the universe, has treasured up with Himself, for those who love godliness, greater blessings than human thought has conceived; and, by giving the earnest and first-fruits of future rewards even here, assures, in some sort, immortal hopes to mortal eyes. The ancient oracles of the prophets, delivered to us in the Scripture, declare this; the lives of pious men, who shone in old time with every virtue, attest the same; and our own days prove it to be true, wherein CONSTANTINE, who alone of all that ever wielded the Roman power was the friend of God the Sovereign of all, has appeared to all mankind so bright an example of a godly life.