The emperor had great faith in prayer. He says, "The righteous prayer is a thing invincible, and no one fails to attain his object who addresses holy supplication to God." He believed in a judgment and future punishment for the wicked.
The principal faults of this founder of the Christian power in Rome were, according to Mosheim, Gibbon and other historians, very similar to those of our English sovereign Henry VIII., founder of the Protestant ascendency in Great Britain. He was wilful, voluptuous, and self-conceited. His heart was capable of extreme cruelty, as shown by his acts toward several of his near relatives.[1] Even a son, named Crispus, fell a victim to his jealous resentment.[2] He assumed that he was born to reign, and held his commission from God. The flattery of the prelates might have augmented this conceit; for it was sometimes excessively fulsome.
Eusebius says, that on one occasion a Christian orator asserted, in the emperor's presence, that he would share the Empire of Heaven with Christ in the world to come. See Life of Constantine, book IV. chap. 48; English translation of 1845 (anonymous), which I have often quoted.
Constantine favored the Arians very much in
- ↑ Gibbon says, that, after Constantine had put his wife's father to death, in Gaul, he gained a victory over the Franks and Allemanni, and gave their chiefs to be devoured by wild beasts in the public ampitheatre of Treves. Another historian says, a great number of the French youth were also exposed to the same cruel and ignominious death. "Yet," says Gibbon, "his reign in Gaul, excepting his destruction of Maximian, seems to have been the most innocent and even virtuous period of his life."
- ↑ Julian charged his uncle, Constantine, who was also the father of his wife, with being "a voluptuary, a profligate and a murderer." Dean Stanley says, he put to death live of his near relatives, one being his wife, Fausta, and one, an eleven-year old son of Licinus and his wife Constantia, Constantine's own sister.
