Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Series II/Volume I/Constantine/The Life of Constantine/Book II/Chapter 27

by Philip Schaff et al.

Chapter XXVII.—How the Persecution became the Occasion of Calamities to the Aggressors.

“From the causes I have described, grievous wars arose, and destructive devastations. Hence followed a scarcity of the common necessaries of life, and a crowd of consequent miseries: hence, too, the authors of these impieties have either met a disastrous death of extreme suffering, or have dragged out an ignominious existence, and confessed it to be worse than death itself, thus receiving as it were a measure of punishment proportioned to the heinousness of their crimes.^[1] For each experienced a degree of calamity according to the blind fury with which he had been led to combat, and as he thought, defeat the Divine will: so that they not only felt the pressure of the ills of this present life, but were tormented also by a most lively apprehension of punishment in the future world.^[2]

Footnotes

1. Compare Lactantius, On the deaths of the persecutors (De M. P.), and the Church History of Eusebius.
2. Literally “beneath the earth,” referring of course to the Græco-Roman conception of Hades.