eady Constantine, by bestowing on the Church the right of
receiving bequests, had given birth to that power which, reposing on the
influence that always attaches to the possession of land, becomes at
last overwhelming when it is held by a corporation which may always
receive and can never alienate, which is always renewing itself and can
never die. It was by no miraculous agency, but simply by its
organization, that the Church attained to power; an individual who must
die, and a family which must become extinct, had no chance against a
corporation whose purposes were ever unchanged, and its life perpetual.
But it was not the state alone which thus took detriment from her
connection with the Church; the latter paid a full price for the
temporal advantages she received in admitting civil intervention in her
affairs. After a retrospect of a thousand years, the pious Fratricelli
loudly proclaimed their conviction that the fatal gift of a Christian
emperor had been the doom of true religion.

[Sidenote: His conversion and death.]

From the rough soldier who accepted the purple at York, how great the
change to the effeminate emperor of the Bosphorus, in silken robes
stiffened with threads of gold, a diadem of sapphires and pearls, and
false hair stained of various tints; his steps stealthily guarded by
mysterious eunuchs flitting through the palace, the streets full of
spies, and an ever-watchful police! The same man who approaches us as
the Roman imperator retires from us as the Asiatic despot. In the last
days of his life, he put aside the imperial purple, and, assuming the
customary white garment, prepared for baptism, that the sins of his long
and evil life might all be washed away. Since complete purification can
thus be only once obtained, he was desirous to procrastinate that
ceremony to the last moment. Profoundly politic, even in his relations
with heaven, he thenceforth reclined on a white bed, took no further
part in worldly affairs, and, having thus insured a right to the
continuance of that prosperity in a future life which he had enjoyed in
this, expired, A.D. 337.

[Sidenote: The Trinitarian controversy.]

In a theological respect, among the chief events of this emperor's reign
are the Trinitarian controversy and the open materialization of
Christianity. The former, commencing among the Platonizing
ecclesiastics of Alexandria, continued for ages to exert a formidable
influence. From time immemorial, as we h