l as soon as
it was called by the name of a living emperor indicates the position
designed for Christianity in the imperial structure of Constantine.
Diocletian's attempt to transform the Roman Government into a despotism
of the Eastern type had brought on the last and most serious persecution
of the Christians; and Constantine, in adopting their faith, intended
neither to abandon his predecessor's scheme of policy nor to renounce
the fascinations of arbitrary authority, but to strengthen his throne
with the support of a religion which had astonished the world by its
power of resistance, and to obtain that support absolutely and without a
drawback he fixed the seat of his government in the East, with a
patriarch of his own creation.

Nobody warned him that by promoting the Christian religion he was tying
one of his hands, and surrendering the prerogative of the Caesars. As the
acknowledged author of the liberty and superiority of the Church, he was
appealed to as the guardian of her unity. He admitted the obligation; he
accepted the trust; and the divisions that prevailed among the
Christians supplied his successors with many opportunities of extending
that protectorate, and preventing any reduction of the claims or of the
resources of imperialism.

Constantine declared his own will equivalent to a canon of the Church.
According to Justinian, the Roman people had formally transferred to the
emperors the entire plenitude of its authority, and, therefore, the
Emperor's pleasure, expressed by edict or by letter, had force of law.
Even in the fervent age of its conversion the Empire employed its
refined civilisation, the accumulated wisdom of ancient sages, the
reasonableness and subtlety of Roman law, and the entire inheritance of
the Jewish, the Pagan, and the Christian world, to make the Church serve
as a gilded crutch of absolutism. Neither an enlightened philosophy, nor
all the political wisdom of Rome, nor even the faith and virtue of the
Christians availed against the incorrigible tradition of antiquity.
Something was wanted beyond all the gifts of reflection and
experience--a faculty of self-government and self-control, developed
like its language in the fibre of a nation, and growing with its growth.
This vital element, which many centuries of warfare, of anarchy, of
oppression had extinguished in the countries that were still draped in
the pomp of ancient civilisation, was deposited on the soil of
Christendom by