livened ever and anon by an episcopal election. which in those controversial times excited to fever heat the sympathies and antipathies of the rabble. In the great eastern capitals the profoundest mysteries of theology were profaned by being made the street and party cries of raging mobs. Meanwhile, along the northern frontier and on the eastern verge of the empire dense clouds of Goths and Persians were hovering like birds of prey.

To be within reaching distance of the threatening Persian was doubtless the principal motive that led Constantine to create a new capital on the strait that parts Europe and Asia. Several years before, the Emperor Diocletian had established himself in Bithynia, that he might be near the seat of war in the east: for strategic and administrative reasons, moreover, he had halved and quartered the empire-and his partner in the supreme authority had fixed his residence at Milan, whence he could guard more effectively than at Rome against the attacks of the northern barbarians. But the forces of centralization were still potent enough to reunite the Empire, and the closing scenes of the struggle that gave to Constantine the undisputed lordship of the Roman world occurred in the neighborhood of Byzantium. While conducting the siege of that city in the year 323, he was deeply impressed by the unrivalled advantages of its situation. Perhaps he

had already conceived the ambition further to immortalize his name by adding to the number of the great cities of the world; it appears that throughout this whole period the emperors felt a deep-seated, almost instinctive aversion to Rome; in the case of the first imperial convert to Christianity that aversion found its sufficient ground in the tenacity with which the Roman patricians clung to their ancient religion: Constantine would found a capital that should be Christian from the outset-where the atmosphere should be congenial to his newly adopted faith. The superb situation of Byzantium determined his choice of a site: behold, then, that small but ancient city-it had already a history extending over a thousand years-transformed as fast as the resources of the empire would permit into a second Rome. In the centre of a spacious forum a towering column was reared, to sustain a colossal statue of the emperor in the character of the god of day. Beyond the forum rose the walls of a hippodrome; the multitudinous sounds of building filled the air; and baths, aqueducts, theatres, churches, colonnades and palaces rose like an exhalation between the Propontis and the Golden Horn. The cities of Greece and Asia were ransacked to people the fresh halls with statues, and the new Rome was soon resplendent with the inimitable treasures of an elder art. Living forms

RISE OF THE PAPAL SUPREMACY.

ΙΟΙ

were lacking—but the mere presence of the emperor ere long caused the want to be supplied. Large estates in Asia were offered, moreover, as an inducement to any who would maintain establishments in the city, while, to feed a populace, the corn supply of the Nile valley was diverted thither from old Rome. The foundation of Constantinople and the Council of Nicæa were the most remarkable events of Constantine's undivided reign. At his death, in the year 337, the empire was portioned out among his three sons, but shortly a fratricidal war broke out in which one of them fell; another was assassinated by a usurper's agent; and by the defeat and death of that usurper, in the year 353, the Roman world. came into the sole possession of the surviving son, Constantius. He was succeeded by his young cousin, Julian-the promoter of a somewhat artificial heathen reaction. Julian was slain in battle with the Persians, and in 364 the empire was divided for the third time. The able general Valentinian was invested with the purple, and assumed the sovereignty of the west, together with Illyria, Macedonia and Greece-resigning the east to his brother Valens. In 378, Valens fell in battle with the Goths; the brave soldier Theodosius was associated in the government, and became practically absolute; after the death of his young ward, Valentinian II., and the suppression of a re

bellion, Theodosius reigned without a colleague or rival for the space of four months. Upon his death, in 395, the empire was parted for the fourth and final time, and there appeared in the east a shadowy simulacrum of the monarchy of Alexander the Great. The extraordinary vitality of Grecian civilization manifested itself anew, and differences of language, culture, and temperament reasserted themselves as between the eastern and western basins of the Mediterranean Sea.

I.

With the sudden and marvellous transformation. of his city, the bishop of Byzantium, a mere suffragan of Heraclea, the metropolitan see of Thrace, found himself the bishop of the capital of the Roman World. It was a dizzy and dangerous elevation, exposed to all the lightnings that played about the throne. The emperors of Rome were fast beginning to assume the character of Oriental despots, the magnificent masters of a universe of slaves. Great part of the taxation under which the world groaned was designed to support a court of unapproachable splendor and luxury, the central luminary of which should be the person of the sovereign, shrouded in a kind of cloudy glory, in majesty inaccessible. Such was the ideal of Constantine, such the "divinity" of the emperor, against the fascination of which the

most Christian prelates were not proof. Truly that statue in the forum had a symbolic value. And so the bishopric of Byzantium emerged from its obscurity-happy in that it had no historyinto a noonday glare, and became a prize to be contended for, and eventually the supreme historic example of a state church in all its vicissi tudes and tribulations, its strength and weakness, its grandeur and degradation.

Upon the death of Constantine the Arian controversy broke out with increased fury. That we may do justice to that age, and not simply turn with disgust and weariness of spirit from its shameful record of party violence and vindictiveness, we should remember that the rage of controversy was seriously aggravated when the emperor became a party to it, that the temporal rewards and penalties that he held out for compliance, or opposition to his will, powerfully excited the hopes and fears of the combatants. In extenuation of the conduct of the rulers, moreover, it should be remembered that the idea of religious toleration had only a precarious footing in that age: it was exercised in the interest of heathenism, and only so long as that decaying faith had still vitality enough to command it,-and it was further discredited as the policy of the crafty heathen Julian, designed to embarrass and if possible to destroy the Christian church. The notion that, for stability of