CHAPTER XIII.
DEBASEMENT OF THE NEW POWER WHEN SEIZED BY RULERS.
Cost of making the New Ideas triumphant—Change in Character in the hands of
Kings, Courtiers, and Profitmongers—Emancipations become a matter of
Policy and Profit—Repudiation of Principles of Fraternity and Equality—Horrors
of Introduction of Proletarianism.
We have seen, in the two last chapters, what terrible tribulations it cost the early Christians to obtain admission into the world for the doctrines of liberty, fraternity, and equality,—we ought rather, perhaps, to say, for the more comprehensive doctrines of justice and humanity, upon which the others must be based to be real and enduring. For upwards of three hundred years these poor Christians were the victims of an untiring persecution, which smote them without pity and without remorse, in every part of the wide-extended Roman empire. We have seen how, at ten distinct epochs, by the edicts of as many emperors, this persecution burst upon them with such signal and surpassing fury that, to this day, it seems almost a miracle that the sect was not utterly extirpated. More marvellous still, we find them growing and extending themselves after every persecution, till at length, under Constantine, they have become so numerous and formidable that persecution may no longer be safely tried. Indeed, force would no longer prevail; so fraud must be resorted to. The sham conversion of Constantine and his courtiers was the fraud had recourse to. Those hypocrites suddenly pretended to a new light. Constantine made his own conversion quite a supernatural affair; he pretended to have seen a brilliant apparition in the heavens, presenting a cross with this inscription, "In hoc signo vinces,"—"In this sign thou shalt conquer." His courtiers and expectants, of course, partook of the imperial illumination; they discovered with miraculous haste, if not by miraculous agency, the divine authority of the Christian religion. By embracing it in name and profession they wisely calculated they could more easily extinguish it in substance and in practice than by any other means. In the first place, it would detach the mere political Christians—i.e., the selfish and ambitious ones—from the real ones, the honest, unsuspecting mass. In the next place, it would conciliate the former by throwing open to them the offices and honours of the state; and, at the same time, flatter the multitude by the seeming conversion of an emperor and his court to their religion. Above all, it would have the advantage of pricking up the Christian organization (which, up to that epoch, was a veritable democratic organization) by detaching from the multitude all their leading spiritual and political chiefs, who would thenceforward be sure to have one doctrine for the rich and another for the poor, in order to keep the
