CHAPTER VI

THE FATHER OF CONSTANTINE PERMITTED THE PROPAGATION OF CHRISTIANITY, BUT CONSTANTINE THE GREAT CAUSED IT TO BE PREACHED THROUGHOUT THE WORLD

UNDER the government of Constantine, the churches flourished, and increased in numbers, they were enriched by the benevolence and favour of the emperor, and God preserved them from the persecutions and troubles which they had previously encountered. When the churches were suffering from persecution in other parts of the world, Constantius alone, the father of Constantine, protected the Christians. I know of an extraordinary fact relating to him which is worthy of being recorded. He wished to test the fidelity of certain Christians, excellent and good men, who were attached to his palace. He called them all together, and told them that if they would sacrifice to idols as well as serve God, they should remain in his service and retain their appointments; but that if they refused compliance with his wishes, they should be sent from the palace, and should scarcely escape his vengeance. When difference of judgment had divided them into two parties, separating those who consented to abandon their religion from those who preferred the honour of God to their present welfare, the emperor determined upon retaining those who had adhered to their faith as his friends and counsellors; but he turned away from the others, whom he regarded as unmanly impostors, and sent them from his presence, judging that they who had so readily betrayed their God, could not be faithful to their king. Hence, as Christians were deservedly retained in the service of Constantius, he was not willing that Christianity should be accounted unlawful in the countries beyond the confines of Italy, that is to say, in Gaul, in Britain, or in the region of the Pyrenean mountains as far as the Western Ocean. When Constantine succeeded to this government, the affairs of the churches became still more prosperous. And when Maxentius, the son of Herculius, was slain, the government of his provinces devolved upon Constantine; and the nations who dwelt by the river Tiber and the Eridanus, the people who were called the aborigines of Padua, those who dwelt by the Aquiline, whither, it is said, the ship of Argos was dragged, and the inhabitants of the coasts of the Tyrrhenian Sea, were permitted the exercise of their religion without molestation.

When the Argonauts fled from Æetes, they returned homewards by a different route, crossed the sea of Scythia, sailed up the mouth of some river, and so gained the shores of Italy, where they built a city, which they called Hemona. The following summer, with the assistance of the people of the country, they dragged their ship, by means of machinery, the distance of four hundred stadia, and so reached the Aquiline, a river which falls into the Eridanus: the Eridanus itself falls into the Italian Sea.

After the battle of Cibalæ, the Greeks and the Macedonians, the inhabitants of the banks of the Danube, of Achaia, and the whole nation of Illyria, became subject to Constantine.