ning himself the temporal power.

The persecution of heresy was carried out by Constantine with all the
ardour of a convert. An edict confiscated the public property of the
heretics to the use either of the revenue or the Catholic Church, and
the penal regulations of Diocletian against the Christians were now
employed against the schismatics. The Donatists, who maintained the
apostolic succession of Donatus, primate of Carthage, as opposed to
Caecilian, were suppressed in Africa, and a general synod attempted to
regulate the faith of the Church.

The subject of the nature of the divine Trinity had early given rise to
discussion. Of the three main heretical views, that of Arius and his
disciples was the most prevalent. He held in effect that the Son, by
whom all things were made, though He had been begotten before all
worlds, yet had not always existed. He shone only with the reflected
light of His Almighty Father, and, like the sons of the Roman emperors,
who were invested with the titles of Caesar or Augustus. He governed the
universe.

The Tritheists advocated a system which seemed to establish three
independent deities, while the Sabellian theory allowed only to the man
Jesus the inspiration of the divine wisdom. The consubstantiality of the
Father and of the Son had been established by the Council of Nicaea in
325, but the East ranged itself for the most part under the banner of
the Arian heresy. At first indifferent, Constantine at last persecuted
the Arians, who later, under Constantius, were received into favour.

Constantinople, which for forty years was the stronghold of Arianism,
was converted to the orthodox faith under Theodosius by Gregory
Nazianzen.

_IV.--The Conversion of the World_

The pagan religion was finally destroyed about the year 390, and the
faintest vestiges of it were not visible thirty years later. Its
influence, however, might be observed in many of the ceremonies which
were introduced into the Church, and the worship of martyrs and relics
seemed to revive a system of polytheism by the worship of a hierarchy of
saints. Among the most famous of the dignitaries of the Church at this
period was the Archbishop of Constantinople, who was distinguished by
the epithet of Chrysostom, or the Golden Mouth. He attempted to purify
the eastern empire, excited the animosity of the Empress Eudoxia, and
died in exile in 407.

The monastic system had been founded by Antony, an illiterate youth,