a village in the empire--nay, what was indeed far more
serious, there was not a legion in which these organizations did not
exist. The uncompromising and inexorable spirit animating them brought
on necessarily a triple alliance of the statesmen, the philosophers, and
the polytheists. These three parties, composing or postponing their
mutual disputes, cordially united to put down the common enemy before it
should be too late. It so fell out that the conflict first broke out in
the army. When the engine of power is affected, it behoves a prince to
take heed. The Christian soldiers in some of the legions refused to join
in the time-honoured solemnities for propitiating the gods. It was in
the winter A.D. 302-3. The emergency became so pressing that a council
was held by Diocletian and Galerius to determine what should be done.
The difficulty of the position may perhaps be appreciated when it is
understood that even the wife and daughter of Diocletian himself were
adherents of the new religion. He was a man of such capacity and
enlarged political views that, at the second council of the leading
statesmen and generals, he would not have been brought to give his
consent to repression if it had not been quite clear that a conflict was
unavoidable. His extreme reluctance to act is shown by the express
stipulation he made that there should be no sacrifice of life. It is
scarcely necessary to relate the events which ensued; how the Church of
Nicomedia was razed to the ground; how, in retaliation, the imperial
palace was set on fire; how an edict was openly insulted and torn down;
how the Christian officers in the army were compelled to resign; and, as
Eusebius, an eye-witness, relates, a vast number of martyrs soon
suffered in Armenia, Syria, Mauritania, Egypt, and elsewhere. So
resistless was the march of events that not even the emperor himself
could stop the persecution. The Christians were given over to torture,
the fire, wild beasts, beheading; many of them, in the moment of
condemnation, simply returning thanks to God that he had thought them
worthy to suffer. The whole world was filled with admiration. The
greatness of such holy courage could have no other result. An
internecine conflict between the disputants seemed to be inevitable.
But, in the dark and bloody policy of the times, the question was
settled in an unexpected way. To Constantine, who had fled from the
treacherous custody of Galerius, it naturally occurred tha