Therefore it is not too much to repeat that, from Christianity alone the world has received that inestimable boon, the rights of conscience; and the principle invaluable alike to religion, the State, and the individual- of the absolute, complete, and total separation between the civil and the religious powers.

Yet this victory of Christianity over Pagan Rome was no sooner won, and the assured triumph of Christianity was no sooner at hand, than ambitious bishops and political priests perverted it and destroyed the prospect of all its splendid fruit. They seized upon the civil power, and by making the State the servant of the church, established a despotism as much more cruel than the one which had just been conquered, as the truth which was thus perverted was higher, nobler, and more glorious than the evil system which had been established in the blindness and error of paganism.

The system which had been conquered was that in which the State recognizes and makes use of religion only for its political value, and only as the servant of the State. This was paganism, and such a system is pagan wherever found. The system which was established by the perversion of Christianity and the splendid victory that it had won, was a system in which the State is made the servant of the church, and in which the power of the State is exercised to promote the interests of the church. This was the papacy.

And to tell the history of the perversion of Christianity, and the establishment, and the support, of the papal despotism, is the purpose of the following chapters of this book.

CHAPTER VI.

THE RISE OF CONSTANTINE.

URING the eighty years occupied for the most part by

DURING

the "dark, unrelenting Tiberius, the furious Caligula, the feeble Claudius, the profligate and cruel Nero, the beastly Vitellius, and the timid, inhuman Domitian," "Rome groaned beneath an unremitting tyranny, which exterminated the ancient families of the republic and was fatal to almost every virtue, and every talent, that arose in that unhappy period.” — Gibbon.1

This dreary scene was relieved by a respite of eighty-four years through the successful reigns of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius; only to be opened up again by Commodus, A. D. 180, and to continue unrelieved for more than one hundred years. It is useless to pursue the subject in detail. Of this period it may be remarked as of one before, that to attempt to follow it in detail, would be only "to record the mandates of despotism, incessant accusations, faithless friendships, the ruin of innocence; one unvarying repetition of causes terminating in the same event, and presenting no novelty from their similarity and tiresome reiteration." Tacitus."

The inroads of the barbarians obliged the legions to be always stationed on the frontier of the empire, all the way from the mouth of the Rhine to the mouth of the Danube. Emperors were made and unmade by the soldiers according to their own caprice, many of whom never saw the capital 1" Decline and Fall," chap. iii, par. 33. "Annals,” book iv, chap. xxxiii.

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of their empire; and the office was one so certainly to be terminated by murder that although from Commodus to Constantine there were sixty men named as emperor, only seven died a natural death; two-Decius and Valerian perished by the enemy; and all the rest were murdered in the internal strifes of the failing empire.

DIOCLETIAN,

the commander of the imperial body-guard, was proclaimed emperor by the troops September 17, 285. He organized a system by which he wished to give to the office of emperor a tenure more secure than that allowed by the licentious caprice of the soldiery. He reigned alone only about six months, when April 1, a. D. 286- he associated with himself in the office of emperor, Maximian. Six years afterward, March 1, A. D. 292, he named two other associates, Galerius and Constantius, though in inferior stations. Diocletian and Maximian each bore the title of Augustus, while Galerius and Constantius each bore that of Cæsar. Both these Cæsars were already married, but each was obliged to put away his wife and be adopted as a son, and marry a daughter, of one of the Augusti. Galerius was adopted as the son of Diocletian, and married his daughter; Constantius as the son of Maximian, and married his step-daughter. The empire was then divided into four principal parts, each to be governed by one of the four emperors. Diocletian retained as his part, Thrace, Egypt, and Asia. To Maximian was given Italy and Africa. Upon Galerius was bestowed what was known as the Illyrian provinces, bounded by Thrace, the Adriatic, the Danube, the Alps, and the Rhine; while to Constantius fell all that was west of the Rhine and the Alps; namely, Gaul, Spain, and Britain.

It appears to have been Diocletian's intention that whenever the place of either of the two Augusti became vacant, it should be filled by one of the Cæsars, whose place in turn should be filled by a new appointment, thus securing a per