as precisely because it addressed the poor of this world in
providing a compensation in the life to come that Christianity made so
many proselytes. Persecution, far from suppressing it, gave it more
force. "The blood of the martyrs," said the faithful, "is the seed of
the church." During the whole of the third century conversions
continued, not only among the poor, but among the aristocracy as well.
At the first of the fourth century all the East had become Christian.
Helena, the mother of Constantine, was a Christian and has been
canonized by the church. When Constantine marched against his rival,
he took for his ensign a standard (the labarum), which bore the cross
and the monogram of Christ. His victory was the victory of the
Christians. He allowed them now to perform their religious rites
freely (by the edict of 313), and later he favored them openly. Yet
he did not break with the ancient religion: while he presided at the
great assembly of the Christian bishops, he continued to hold the
title of Pontifex Maximus; he carried in his helmet a nail of the true
cross and on his coins he still had the sun-god represented. In his
city of Constantinople he had a Christian church built, but also a
temple to Victory. For a half-century it was difficult to know what
was the official religion of the empire.

=Organization of the Church.=--The Christians even under persecution
had never dreamed of overthrowing the empire. As soon as persecution
ceased, the bishops became the allies of the emperors. Then the
Christian church was organized definitively, and it was organized on
the model of the Later Empire, in the form that it preserves to this
day. Each city had a bishop who resided in the city proper and
governed the people of the territory; this territory subject to the
bishop was termed a Diocese. In any country in the Later Empire, there
were as many bishops and dioceses as there were cities. This is why
the bishops were so numerous and dioceses so many in the East and in
Italy where the country was covered with cities. In Gaul, on the
contrary, there were but 120 dioceses between the Rhine and the
Pyrenees, and the most of these, save in the south, were of the size
of a modern French department. Each province became an ecclesiastical
province; the bishop of the capital (metropolis) became the
metropolitan, or as he was later termed, the archbishop.

=The Councils.=--In this century began the councils, the great
assemblies