quires some notice of the more remarkable circumstances that preceded and accompanied the memorable events to which they refer.

A picture of adequate magnitude, and in vivid colours, of the religious and moral condition of the Roman empires in the last periods of their existence, has been painted with dramatic vigour and graphic accuracy by the master hand of Gibbon. It abounds with representations full of horror and pollution; the outlines of a faint sketch contracted to a narrow scale, wherein the loathsome details may be permitted to fade into the obscurity of a distant perspective, will be sufficient for my purpose.

To have discerned the foundation even of a doubt that Constantine's public profession and establishment of christianity could be otherwise than the source of benefits, immediate, permanent, and unmixed, to its dearest interests, may not have been within the limits of human intelligence. The records of every nation teach one uniform lesson, instructively humiliating to the presumption of man, that he is so far from being master of the world wherein he is permitted to sojourn, his most laborious meditation can foresee but little of the consequences of his actions, which he invariably finds to be directed to their ultimate results by an agency wholly independent of his will, his wisdom, or his folly. Blind as he is to the future, his judgment of the past has no claim to infallibility. Experience may falsify his hopes or his fears without correcting his errors, and his knowledge of the history of eighteen centuries

D

may suggest more readily than solve the question, simple as it sounds, whether the christian religion has suffered more from the enmity or the favour of imperial power?

The tenets of a persecuted faith may be erroneous, and belief in them may be absurd, but it can be embraced only from a conviction of its truth, and the profession of it must have the virtue of sincerity. The plasticity of the human mind will surely acquire and exhibit the characteristic qualities of its condition. The gradations may be insensible, but they will be inevitable, by which compulsory and continued subjection to the brutality of tyrannical power will sink the sufferer from the loftiest summit of moral elevation into all the proverbial baseness of a slave. But the willing endurance of that oppression which may be at any moment terminated by the abandonment of principle, will have the opposite effect of exalting the real and conscious dignity of man. The voluntary martyr to a faith that inculcates forgiveness of the oppressor, must learn and practice the virtues of candour, humility, tenderness, devotion, patience, and fortitude. He will be ennobled by the sentiment of a mental independence that bids defiance to human power. His moral vision will be cleared and invigorated by a keener a keener perception of the odious iniquity of tyranny, and by a holier reverence for the sanctuary of conscience. The liveliest sensibilities, and most generous qualities of his nature will be exercised in indignant sympathy with the unmerited affliction of a com

munity of fellow sufferers. His mind will be purified by, at least occasional, abstraction from perishable objects and sensual indulgences, and will be enlarged by the expansion of his hopes from time to eternity.

The profession of a religion exclusively fostered by power, and dispensing secular benefits to its votaries, can afford but little room for the practice of virtues that are taught only by adversity. But it will supply their place by abundant temptations to servility, sycophancy, avarice, pride, hypocrisy, and to the whole train of the meaner vices.

Establishment implies security, and security is apt to generate indifference. Affliction may teach compassion, but the acquisition of power has a fatal tentendency to degrade the victim into the oppressor.

The church lost no time in using with all the fierce and insolent intolerance from which it was relieved, the authority with which it was invested by Constantine. The religious mind, withdrawn from the holy influence of prayer and spiritual meditation, was wasted in mischievous dispute on matters beyond its comprehension, or unworthy of its concern. The theological doctors of Constantinople and of Rome, marked with authoritative precision the limits within which the salvation of man was permitted to his Creator. They exercised their subtilty, their folly, and their impiety, in settling the precedence of the several persons of the Godhead, and in assigning to each of them his peculiar functions in the eternal government of the universe. Their speculations, however, were

If

not always lifted to such lofty contemplations. They sometimes deigned to occupy the attention of mankind, and to convulse the empire, with furious agitations of such questions as, whether the milk, with which the Virgin suckled the infant Jesus, possessed an essential incapacity of corruption, or was preserved from it only by the continued operation of a special miracle? When such were the subjects of controversy, it would have been marvellous if any of the disputants arrived at a stable conclusion.-The differences of their languages and dialects contributed to multiply their perplexities, and to inflame their anger. a doctor of the eastern church was indignant that his ponderous treatise on the Homoousion was answered in African Latin, he indulged himself with the retaliatory satisfaction of confuting an Italian bishop in Asiatic Greek, while every elucidation made "confusion worse confounded." "We make creeds arbitrarily, and explain them as arbitrarily.The Homoousion is rejected, and received, and explained away, by successive synods. Every year, nay, every moon, we make new creeds to describe invisible mysteries; we repent of what we have done, we defend those who repent, we anathematise those whom we defended; we condemn either the doctrine of others in ourselves or our own in that of others," is part of a letter to the emperor Constantius, in which the illustrious Hilary, bishop of Poitiers, represents the state of the christian church in the fourth century.

But syllogisms were not the only dialectics used.

by the combatants. Their rancorous animosity (for which a name, odium theologicum, was invented, as if a new and peculiarly malignant passion had been recently infused into the human heart) was exhibited, but not allowed to evaporate, in acrimonious scurrility and blasphemous imprecation. That accordance of opinion, which reason could not accomplish, was yet more vainly attempted by every form of brutal violence. The adherents of paganism, who still were numerous, had ample materials for vindictive satisfaction in witnessing the professed followers of the lamb tear each other to pieces (such are the words of Hilary) with the ferocity of tigers. Of the several sects, which the intrigues of sycophancy or the caprice of power successively armed with authority, not one neglected the occasion to refute its opponents by massacre and conflagration. The triumph, however brief, of ascendancy was invariably written in the blood and desolation of cities and provinces. To a body of men, most numerous and influential in those calamitous times, injustice would be done by the omission of the fact, that to every horrible enormity perpetrated in the insulted name of religion, the clergy were the principal instigators. But they did not confine their illustrations of christianity to speculative absurdity, polemical fury, and sanguinary outrage. Their bloody hands intercepted the light of a spiritual faith by a cloud of heathen ceremonies, that served to amuse the senses, but were destitute of every thing that could instruct the understanding, or purify the heart. Religious worship,