ve healing to the
emperor's malady. Alas! what weeping and wailing there was among the
mothers when they heard this cruel decree! How they cried, and clasped
their babes to their breasts, and how they called Constantine more
cruel than Herod, who killed the Holy Innocents! The eastern ruler,
they said, slew only the infants of one poor village, but their
emperor, more ruthless, claimed the lives of all the young children of
his whole empire.

Constantine is Conscience-stricken

But though the mothers lamented bitterly, they must needs bow to the
emperor's decree, whether they were lief or loath, and thus a great
multitude gathered in the great courtyard of the imperial palace at
Rome: women nursing sucking-babes at the breast, or holding toddling
infants by the hand, or with little children running by their sides,
and all so heart-broken and woebegone that many swooned for very
grief. The mothers wailed aloud, the children cried, and the tumult
grew until Constantine heard it, where he sat lonely and wretched in
his darkened room. He looked out of his window on the mournful sight
in the courtyard, and was roused as from a trance, saying to himself:
"O Divine Providence, who hast formed all men alike, lo! the poor man
is born, lives, suffers, and dies, just as does the rich; to wise man
and fool alike come sickness and health; and no man may avoid that
fortune which Nature's law hath ordained for him. Likewise to all men
are Nature's gifts of strength and beauty, of soul and reason, freely
and fully given, so that the poor child is born as capable of virtue
as the king's son; and to each man is given free will to choose virtue
or vice. Yet thou givest to men diversity of rank, wealth or poverty,
lordship or servitude, not always according to their deserts; so much
the more virtuous should that man be to whom thou hast put other men
in subjection, men who are nevertheless his fellows and wear his
likeness. Thou, O God, who hast put Nature and the whole universe
under law, wouldst have all men rule themselves by law, and thou hast
said that a man must do to others such things as he would have done to
himself."

His Noble Resolve

Thus Constantine spoke within himself as he stood by the window and
looked upon the weeping mothers and children, the very sentinels of
his palace pitying them, and trying in vain to comfort them; and a
strife grew strong within him between his natural longing for healing
and deliverance