eginning of the age of Faith in Europe, though I
consider the age of Inquiry as overlapping this epoch, and as
terminating with the military fall of Rome.

Ecclesiastical authors have made everything hinge on the conversion of
Constantine and the national establishment of Christianity. The medium
through which they look distorts the position of objects, and magnifies
the subordinate and the collateral into the chief. Events had been
gradually shaping themselves in such a way that the political fall of
the city of Rome was inevitable. The Romans, as a people, had
disappeared, being absorbed among other nations; the centre of power was
in the army. One after another, the legions put forth competitors for
the purple--soldiers of fortune, whose success could never remove low
habits due to a base origin, the coarseness of a life of camps--who
found no congeniality in the elegance and refinement of those relics of
the ancient families which were expiring in Rome. They despised the
military decrepitude of the superannuated city; her recollections they
hated. To such men the expediency of founding a new capital was an
obvious device; or, if indisposed to undertake so laborious a task, the
removal of the imperial residence to some other of the great towns was
an effectual substitute. It was thus that the residence of Diocletian at
Nicomedia produced such disastrous consequences in a short time to Rome.

[Sidenote: He resolves on removing the metropolis.]

After Constantine had murdered his son Crispus, his nephew Licinius, and
had suffocated in a steam-bath his wife Fausta, to whom he had been
married twenty years, and who was the mother of three of his sons, the
public abhorrence of his crimes could no longer be concealed. A
pasquinade, comparing his reign to that of Nero, was affixed to the
palace gate. The guilty emperor, in the first burst of anger, was on the
point of darkening the tragedy, if such a thing had been possible, by a
massacre of the Roman populace who had thus insulted him. It is said
that his brothers were consulted on this measure of vengeance. The
result of their counsel was even more deadly, for it was resolved to
degrade Rome to a subordinate rank, and build a metropolis elsewhere.

[Sidenote: He is a protector, but not a convert.]

Political conditions thus at once suggested and rendered possible the
translation of the seat of government: the temporary motive was the
vengeance of a great criminal. Per