s,
and particularly the bishop at Rome." There was a change in the form of
government and this change was followed by a train of vices. "Many of
those who had the administration of the church affairs were sunk," he
says, "in luxury and voluptuousness, puffed up with vanity, arrogance and
ambition; possessed with a spirit of contention and discord. They
appropriated to their evangelical function the splendid ensigns of
temporal majesty: a throne, surrounded with ministers, exalted above his
equals, the servant of the meek and humble Jesus.... The titles of
subdeacons, acolythi, ostairii, readers, exorcists, copiatae, would never
have been heard of in the church if its rulers had been assiduously and
zealously employed in promoting the interest of truth and piety by their
labors and their example." He gives an account of the trouble in the
church of Rome between Cornelius and Novatian, in the year 250, who were
aspirants for the Roman See.

Eusebius tells of the increasing vices, schisms, quarrelings of the
bishops, of their greed for money and preeminence in the last half of the
third century. In speaking of the bishops and pastors who had the
administration of church government in the year 260, he says: "But some
that appeared to be our pastors, deserting the law of piety, were inflamed
against each other with mutual strifes, only accumulating quarrels and
threats, rivalship, hostility and hatred to each other, only anxious to
assert the government as a kind of sovereignty for themselves." Then he
adds, "As Jeremiah says, 'The Lord in his anger darkened the daughter of
Sion [the church or moon], and hurled from heaven to earth the glory of
Israel.' "

By this we learn that Eusebius would place the darkening of the church, or
the beginning of the dark noonday, near the year 260 A.D. Quotations could
be transcribed from Coleman, Marsh, Waddington and others, in which they
all place the close of the morning light and the rise of the apostasy or
dark noonday between the years 260 and 280 A.D. To our knowledge, Joseph
Milner is the only non-contemporary historian that fixes the date to any
definite time. He says, "I know it is common for authors to represent the
great declension of Christianity to have taken place only after its
external establishment under Constantine. But the evidence of history has
compelled me to dissent from this view of things. In fact we have seen
that for a whole generation previous to the persecuti