The early Church was a very simple organization.As soon as it became apparent that the end of the world was not at hand, that the death of Jesus was not to be followed immediately by the Last Judgment,and that the Christians might expect to dwell in this vale of tears for a good long time, the need was felt for a more or less definite form of government.

Originally the Christians (since all of them were Jews) had come together in the synagogue. When the rift had occurred between the Jews and the Gentiles, the latter had betaken themselves to a room in someone's house, and if none could be found big enough to hold all the faithful (and the curious) they had met out in the open or in a deserted stone quarry.

At first these gatherings were held on the Sabbath,but when bad feeling between the Jewish Christians and the Gentile Christians increased, the latter began to drop the habit of keeping the Sabbath day and preferred to meet on Sunday, the day on which the resurrection had taken place.

These solemn celebrations, however, had borne witness to the popular as well as to the emotional character of the entire movement. There were no set speeches or sermons. There were no preachers. Both men and women, whenever they felt themselves inspired by the Holy Fire, had risen up in meeting to give evidence of the faith that was in them.Sometimes, if we are to trust the letters of Paul, these devout brethren, "speaking with tongues," had filled the heart of the great apostle with apprehension for the future. For most of them were simple folk without much education. No one doubted the sincerity of their impromptu exhortations, but very often they got so excited that they raved like maniacs, and while a Church may survive persecution, it is helpless against ridicule. Hence the efforts of Paul and Peter and their successors to bring some semblance of order into this chaos of spiritual divulgation and divine enthusiasm.

At first these efforts met with little success. A regular programme seemed in direct contradiction to the democratic nature of the Christian faith. In the end,however, practical considerations supervened and the meetings became subject to a definite ritual.

They began with the reading of one of the Psalms (to placate the Jewish Christians who might be present).Then the congregation united in a song of praise of more recent composition for the benefit, of the Roman and the Greek worshippers.

The only prescribed form of oration was the famous prayer in which Jesus had summed up his entire philosophy of life. The preaching, however, for several centuries remained entirely spontaneous, and the sermons were delivered only by those who felt that they had something to say.

But when the number of those gatherings increased,when the police, for ever on the guard against secret societies, began to make inquiries, it was necessary that certain men be elected to represent the Christians in their dealings with the rest of the world. Already Paul had spoken highly of the gift of leadership. He had compared the little communities which he visited in Asia and Greece to so many tiny vessels which were tossed upon a turbulent sea and were very much in need of a clever pilot if they were to survive the fury of the angry ocean.

And so the faithful came together once more and elected deacons and deaconesses, pious men and women who were the 'servants' of the community, who took care of the sick and the poor (an object of great concern to the early Christians), and who looked after the property of the community and took care of all the small daily concerns.

Still later, when the Church continued to grow in membership and the business of administration had become too intricate for mere amateurs, it was entrusted to a small group of 'elders.' These were known by their Greek name of 'Presbyters' and hence our word 'priest'.

After a number of years, when every village or city possessed a Christian church of its own, the need was felt for a common policy. Then an 'overseer' (an episkopos or bishop) was elected to superintend an entire district and direct its dealings with the Roman government.

Soon there were bishops in all the principal towns of the Empire, and those in Antioch and Constantinople and Jerusalem and Carthage and Rome and Alexandria and Athens were reputed to be very powerful gentlemen who were almost as important as the civil and military governors of their provinces.

In the beginning, of course, the bishop who presided over that part of the world where Jesus had lived and suffered and died enjoyed the greatest respect. But after Jerusalem had been destroyed and the generation which had expected the end of the World and the triumph of Zion had disappeared from the face of the earth, the poor old bishop saw himself deprived of his former prestige.

And quite naturally his place as leader of the faithful was taken by the 'overseer' who lived in the capital of the civilized world and who guarded the sites where Peter and Paul, the great apostles of the west, had suffered their martyrdom—the Bishop of Rome.

This bishop, like all others, was known as 'Father'or 'Papa,' the common expression of love and respect bestowed upon members of the clergy. In the course of centuries the title of 'Papa,' however, became almost exclusively associated in people's minds with the particular 'Father' who was the head of the metropolitan diocese. When they spoke of the Papa or Pope they meant just one Father, the Bishop of Rome,and not by any chance the Bishop of Constantinople or the Bishop of Carthage. This was an entirely normal development. When we read in our newspaper about"the King" it is not necessary to add "of England."

The first time the name occurred officially in a document was in the year 258. At that time Rome was still the capital of a highly successful empire and the power of the bishops was entirely overshadowed by that of the emperors. But during the next three hundred years, under the constant menace of both foreign and domestic invasions, the successors of Caesar began to look for a new home that would offer them greater safety. This they found in a city in a different part of their domains. It was called Byzantium, after a mythical hero by the name of Byzas, who was said to have landed there shortly after the Trojan War. Situated on the straits which separated Europe from Asia and dominating the trade route between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, it controlled several important monopolies and was of such great commercial importance that already Sparta and Athens had fought for the possession of this rich fortress.

Byzantium, however, had held its own until the days of Alexander, and after having been for a short while part of Macedonia if had finally been incorporated into the Roman Empire.

And now, after ten centuries of increasing prosperity,its Golden Horn filled with the ships from a hundred nations, it was chosen to become the centre of the Empire.

The people of Rome, left to the mercy of Visigoths and Vandals and Heaven knows what other sort of barbarians, felt that the end of the world had come,when the imperial palaces stood empty for years at a time, when one department of state after another was removed to the shores of the Bosphorus, and when the inhabitants of the capital were asked to obey laws made a thousand miles away.

But in the realm of history, it is an ill wind that does not blow someone good. With the emperors gone,the bishops remained behind as the most important dignitaries of the town, the only visible and tangible successors to the glory of the imperial throne.

And what excellent use they made of their new independence! They were shrewd politicians, for the prestige and the influence of their office had attracte the best brains of all Italy. They felt themselves to be the representatives of certain eternal ideas. Hence they were never in a hurry, but proceeded with the deliberate slowness of a glacier and dared to take chances where others, acting under the pressure of immediate necessity, made rapid decisions, blundered,and failed.

But most important of all, they were men of a single purpose, who moved consistently and persistently toward one goal. In all they did and said and thought they were guided by the desire to increase the glory of God and the strength and power of the organization which represented the divine will on earth.

How well they wrought, the history of the next ten centuries was to show.

While everything else perished in the deluge of savage tribes which hurled itself across the European continent, while the walls of the Empire, one after the other, came crumbling down, while a thousand institutions as old as the plains of Babylon were swept away like so much useless rubbish, the Church stood strong and erect, the rock of ages, but more particularly the rock of the Middle Ages.

The victory, however, which was finally won, was brought at a terrible cost.

For Christianity which had begun in a stable was allowed to end in a palace. It had been started as a protest against a form of government in which the priest as the self-appointed intermediary between the deity and mankind had insisted upon the unquestioning obedience of all ordinary human beings. This revolutionary body grew and in less than a hundred years it developed into a new super theocracy, compared in which the old Jewish state had been a mild and liberal commonwealth of happy and care-free citizens.

And yet all this was perfectly logical and quite unavoidable, as I shall now try to show you.

Most of the people who visit Rome make a pilgrimage to the Colosseum, and within those windswept walls they are shown the hallowed ground where thousands of Christian martyrs fell as victims of Roman intolerance.

But while it is true that upon several occasions there were persecutions of the adherents of the new faith,these had very little to do with religious intolerance.

They were purely political.

The Christian, as a member of a religious sect,enjoyed the greatest possible freedom.

But the Christian who openly proclaimed himself a conscientious objector, who bragged, of his pacifism even when the country was threatened with foreign invasion, and openly defied the laws of the land upon every suitable and unsuitable occasion, such a Christian was considered an enemy of the State and was treated as such.

That he acted according to his most sacred convictions did not make the slightest impression upon the mind of the average police judge. And when he tried to explain the exact nature of his scruples, that dignitary looked puzzled and was entirely unable to follow him.

A Roman police judge after all was only human.When he suddenly found himself called upon to try people who made an issue of what seemed to him very trivial matter, he simply did not know what to do. Long experience had taught him to keep clear of all theological controversies. Besides he remembered many imperial edicts, admonishing public servants to use 'tact' in their dealings with the new sect. Hence he used tact and argued. But as the whole dispute boiled down to a question of principles, very little was ever accomplished by an appeal to logic.

In the end, the magistrate was placed before the choice of surrendering the dignity of the law or insisting upon a complete and unqualified vindication of the supreme power of the State. But prison and torture meant nothing to people who firmly believed that life did not begin until after death and who rejoiced at the idea of being allowed to leave this wicked world for the joys of Heaven.

The guerilla warfare which finally broke out between the authorities and their Christian subjects,therefore, was long and painful. We possess very few authentic figures upon the total number of victims.According to Origen, the famous church father of the third century, several of whose own relatives had been killed in Alexandria during one of the persecutions,"the number of true Christians who died for their convictions could easily be enumerated."

On the other hand, when we peruse the lives of the early saints we find ourselves faced by such incessant tales of bloodshed that we begin to wonder how a religion exposed to these constant and murderous persecutions could ever have survived at all.

No matter what figures I shall give, some one is sure to call me a prejudiced liar. I will therefore keep my opinion to myself and let my readers draw their own conclusions. By studying the lives of the Emperors Decius (249–251) and Valerian (253–260) they will be able to form a fairly accurate opinion as to the true character of Roman intolerance during the worst era of persecution.

Furthermore, if they will remember that as wise and liberal minded a ruler as Marcus Aurelius confessed himself unable to handle the problem of his Christian subjects successfully, they will derive some idea as to the difficulties which beset obscure little officials in remote corners of the Empire, who tried to do their duty and must either be unfaithful to their oath of office or execute those of their relatives and neighbours who could not or would not obey those few and very simple ordinances upon which the Imperial Government insisted as a matter of selfpreservation.

Meanwhile the Christians, not hindered by false sentimentality toward their pagan fellow-citizens,were steadily extending the sphere of their influence.

Early in the fourth century the Emperor Gratian at the request of the Christian members of the Roman senate, who complained that it hurt their feelings to gather in the shadow of a heathenish idol, ordered the removal of the statue of Victory which for more than four hundred years had stood in the hall built by Julius Caesar. Several senators protested. This did very little good and only caused a number of them to be sent into exile.

If was then that Quintus Aurelius Symmachus, a devoted patriot of great personal distinction, wrote his famous letter in which he tried to suggest, a compromise.

"Why," so he asked, "should we Pagans and our Christian neighbours not live in peace and harmony?We look up to the same stars, we are fellow-passengers on the same planet and dwell beneath the same sky. What matters it along which road each individual endeavours to find the ultimate truth? The riddle of existence is too great that there should be only one path leading to an answer."

He was not the only man who felt that way and saw the danger which threatened the old Roman tradition of a broadminded religious policy. Simultaneously with the removal of the statue of Victory in Rome a violent quarrel, had broken out between two contending factions of the Christians who had found a refuge in Byzantium. This dispute gave rise to one of the most intelligent discussions of tolerance to which, the world had ever listened. Themistius, the philosopher who was responsible for it, had remained faithful to the gods of his fathers. But when the Emperor Valens took sides in the fight between his orthodox and his nonorthodox Christian subjects, Themistius felt obliged to remind him of his true duty.

"There is," so he said, "a domain over which no ruler can hope to exercise any authority. That is the domain of the virtues and especially that of the religious beliefs of individuals. Compulsion within that field causes hypocrisy and conversions that are based upon fraud. Hence it is much better for a ruler to tolerate all beliefs, since it is only by toleration that civic strife can be averted. Moreover, tolerance is a divine law.God himself has most clearly demonstrated his desire for a number of different religions. And God alone can judge the methods by which humanity aspires to come to an understanding of the Divine Mystery. God delights in the variety of homage which is rendered to Him. He likes the Christians to use certain rites, the Greeks others, the Egyptians again others."

Fine words, indeed, but spoken in vain.

The ancient world together with its ideas and ideals was dead and all efforts to set back the clock of history were doomed beforehand. Life means progress, and progress means suffering. The old order of society was rapidly disintegrating. The army was a mutinous mob of foreign mercenaries. The frontier was in open revolt. England and the other outlying districts had long since been surrendered to the barbarians.

When the final catastrophe took place, those brilliant young men who in centuries past had entered the service of the State found themselves deprived of all but one chance for advancement. That was a career in the Church. As Christian archbishop of Spain they could hope to exercise the power formerly held by the proconsul. As Christian authors they could be certain of a fairly large public if they were willing to devote themselves exclusively to theological subjects.As Christian diplomats they could be sure of rapid promotion if they were willing to represent the Bishop of Borne at the Imperial Court of Constantinople or undertake the hazardous job of gaining the goodwill of some barbarous chieftain in the heart of Gaul or Scandinavia. And finally, as Christian financiers they could hope to make fortunes administering those rapidly increasing estates which had made the occupants of the Lateran Palace the largest landowners of Italy and the richest men of their time.

We have seen something of the same nature during the last five years. Up to the year 1914 the young men of Central Europe who were ambitious and did not depend upon manual labour for their support almost invariably entered the service of the State. They became officers of the different imperial and royal armies and navies. They filled the higher judicial positions, administered the finances or spent years in the colonies as governors or military commanders.They did not expect to grow very rich, but the social prestige of the offices which they held was very great and by the application of a certain amount of intelligence, industry, and honesty, they could look forward to a pleasant life and an honourable old age.

Then came the War and swept aside these last remnants of the old feudal fabric of society. The lower classes took hold of the government. Some few among the former officials were too old to change the habits of a lifetime. They pawned their orders and died. The vast majority, however, surrendered to the inevitable.From childhood on they had been educated to regard business as a low profession, not worthy of their attention. Perhaps business was a low profession, but they had to choose between an office and the poor house. The number of people who will go hungry for the sake of their convictions is always relatively small.And so within a few years after the great upheaval,we find most of the former officers and State officia doing the sort of work which they would not have touched ten years ago and doing it not unwillingly,Besides, as most of them belonged to families which for generations had been trained in executive work and were thoroughly accustomed to handle men, they have found it comparatively easy to push ahead in their new careers and are to-day a great deal happier and decidedly more prosperous than they had ever expected to be.

What business is to-day, the Church was sixteen centuries ago.

It may not always have been easy for young men who traced their ancestry back to Hercules or to Romulus or to the heroes of the Trojan War to take orders from a simple cleric who was the son of a slave, but the simple cleric who was the son of a slave had something to give which the young men who traced their ancestry back to Hercules and Romulus and the heroes of the Trojan War wanted and wanted badly. And therefore, if they were both bright fellows(as they well may have been), they soon learned to appreciate the other fellow's good qualities and got along beautifully. For it is one of the other strange laws of history that the more things appear to be changing, the more they remain the same.

Since the beginning of time it has seemed inevitable that there shall be one small group of clever men and women who do the ruling and a much larger group of not-quite-so-bright men and women who shall do the obeying. The stakes for which these two groups play are at different periods known by different names.Invariably they represent Strength and Leadership on the one hand and Weakness and Compliance on the other. They have been called Empire and Church and Knighthood and Monarchy and Democracy and Slavery and Serfdom and Proletariat. But the mysterious law which governs human development works the name in Moscow as it does in London or Madrid or Washington, for it is bound to neither time nor place. It has often manifested itself under strange forms and disguises. More than once it has worn a lowly garb and has loudly proclaimed its love for humanity, its devotion to God, its humble desire to bring about the greatest of good of the greatest number. But underneath such pleasant exteriors it has always hidden and continues to hide the grim truth of that primeval law which insists that the first duty of man is to keep alive. People who resent the fact that they were born in a world of mammals are apt to get angry at such statements. They call us 'materialistics'and 'cynics' and what not. Because they have always regarded history as a pleasant fairy-tale, they are shocked to discover that it is a science which obeys the same iron rules which govern the rest of the universe.They might as well fight against the habits of parallel lines or the results of the tables of multiplication.

Personally I would advise them to accept the inevitable.

For then and only then can history some day be turned into something that shall have a practical value to the human race and cease to be the ally and confederate of those who profit by racial prejudice,tribal intolerance, and the ignorance of the vast majority of their fellow citizens.

And if any one doubts the truth of this statement,let him look for the proof in the chronicles of those centuries of which I was writing a few pages back.

Let him study the lives of the great leaders of the Church during the first four centuries.

Almost without exception he will find that they came from the ranks of the old Pagan society, that they had been trained in the schools of the Greek philosophers and had only drifted into the Church afterward, when they had been obliged to choose a career. Several of them, of course, were attracted by the new ideas and accepted the words of Christ with heart and soul.But the great majority changed its allegiance from a worldly master to a Heavenly Ruler because the chances for advancement with the latter were infinitely greater.

The Church from her side, always very wise and very understanding, did not look too closely into the motives which had impelled many of her new disciples to take this sudden step. And most carefully she endeavoured to be all things to all men. Those who felt inclined toward a practical and worldly existence were given a chance to make good in the field of politics and economics. While those of a different temperament, who took their faith more emotionally,were offered every possible opportunity to escape from the crowded cities that they might cogitate in silence upon the evils of existence and so might acquire that degree of personal holiness which they deemed necessary for the eternal happiness of their souls.

In the beginning it had been quite easy to lead such a life of devotion and contemplation.

The Church during the first centuries of her existence had been merely a loose spiritual bond between humble folks who dwelled far away from the mansions of the mighty. But when the Church succeeded the empire as ruler of the world, and became a strong political organization with vast realestate holdings in Italy and France and Africa, there were less opportunities for a life of solitude. Many pious men and women began to harken back to the'good old days' when all true Christians had spent their waking hours in works of charity and in prayer. That they might again be happy they now artificially recreated what once had been a natural development of the times.

This movement for a monastic form of life which was to exercise such an enormous influence upon the political and economic development of the next thousand years, and which was to give the Church a devoted group of very useful shock-troops in her warfare upon heathen and heretics, was of Oriental origin.

This need not surprise us.

In the countries bordering the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, civilization was very, very old and the human race was tired to the point of exhaustion. In Egypt alone ten different and separate cycles of culture had succeeded each other since the first settlers had occupied the valley of the Nile. The same was true of the fertile plain between the Tigris and the Euphrates,The vanity of life, the utter futility of all human effort, lay visible in the ruins of thousands of bygone temples and palaces. The younger races of Europe might accept Christianity as an eager promise of life,a constant appeal to their newly regained energy and enthusiasm, but Egyptians and Syrians took their religious experiences in a different mood.

To them it meant the welcome prospect of relief from the curse of being alive. And in anticipation of the joyful hour of death, they escaped from the charnel-house of their own memories and they fled into the desert that they might be alone with their grief and their God and nevermore look upon the reality of existence.

For some curious reason business of reform always seems to have had a particular appeal to soldiers. They,more than all other people, have come into direct conflict with the cruelty and!he horrors of civilization.Furthermore, they have learned that nothing can be accomplished without discipline. The greatest of all modern warriors to fight the battles of the Church was a former captain in the army of the Emperor Charles V.And the man who first gathered the spiritual stragglers into a single organization had been a private in the army of the Emperor Constantine. His name was Pachomius and he was an Egyptian. When he got through with his military service, he joined a small group of hermits who under the leadership of a certain Anthony, who hailed from Isis own country, had left the cities and were living peacefully among the jackals of the desert. But, as the solitary life seemed to lead to all sorts of strange afflictions of the mind and caused certain very regrettable excesses of devotion which made people spend their days on the top of an old pillar or at the bottom of a deserted grave (thereby giving cause for great mirth to the pagans and serious reason for grief to the true believers), Pachomius decided to put the whole movement upon a more practical basis, and in this way he became the founder of the first religious order. From that day on (the middle of the fourth century), hermits living together in small groups obeyed one single commander known as the 'superior general,' who in turn appointed the abbots who were responsible for the different monasteries which they held as so many fortresses of the Lord.

Before Pachomius died in 346 his monastic idea had been curried from Egypt to Rome by the Alexandrian bishop Athanasius and thousands of people had availed themselves of this opportunity to flee the world, its wickedness, and its too insistent creditors.

The climate of Europe, however, and the nature of the people made it necessary that the original plans of the founder be slightly changed. Hunger and cold were not quite so easy to bear under a wintry sky as in the valley of the Nile. Besides, the more practical western mind was disgusted rather than edified by that display of dirt and squalor which seemed to be an integral part of the Oriental ideal of holiness.

"What," so the Italians and the Frenchmen asked themselves, "is to become of those good works upon which the early Church has laid so much stress? Are the widows and the orphans and the sick really very much benefited by the self-mortification of small groups of emaciated zealots who live in the damp caverns of a mountain a million miles away from everywhere?"

The western mind therefore insisted upon a modification of the monastic institution along more reasonable lines, and credit for this innovation goes to a native of the town, of Nursia in the Apennine mountains. His name was Benedict and he is invariably spoken of as Saint Benedict. His parents had sent him to Rome In be educated, but the city had tilled his Christian soul with horror and he had fled to the village of Subiaco in the Abruzzi mountains, to the deserted ruins of an old country palace that once upon a time had belonged to the Emperor Nero.

There he had lived for three years in complete solitude. Then the fame of his great virtue began to spread throughout the countryside, and the number of those who wished to be near him was soon so great that he had enough recruits for a dozen full-fledged monasteries.

He therefore retired from his dungeon and became the lawgiver of European monasticism. First of all he drew up a constitution. In every detail it showed the influence of Benedict's Roman origin. The monks who swore to obey his rules could not look forward to a life of idleness. Those hours which they did not devote to prayer and meditation were to be filled with work in the fields. If they were too old for farm work they were expected to teach the young how to become good Christians and useful citizens, and so well did they acquit themselves of this task that the Benedictine monasteries for almost a thousand years had a monopoly of education and were allowed to train most of the young men of exceptional ability during the greater part of the Middle Ages.

In return for their labours, the monks were decently clothed, received a sufficient amount of eatable food,and were given a bed upon which they could sleep the two or three hours of each day that were not devoted to work or to prayer.

But most important, from an historical point of view, was the fact that the monks ceased to be laymen who had merely run away from this world and their obligations to prepare their souls for the hereafter.They became the servants of God. They were obliged to qualify for their new dignity by a long and most painful period of probation, and furthermore they were expected to take a direct and active part in spreading the power and the glory of the Kingdom of God.

The first elementary missionary work among the heathen of Europe had already been done. But lest the good accomplished by the apostles come to naught, the labours of the individual preachers must be followed up by the organized effort of permanent settlers and administrators. The monks now carried their spade and their axe and their prayer-book into the wilderness of Germany and Scandinavia and Russia and far-away Iceland. They ploughed and they harvested and they preached and they taught school and brought unto those distant lands the first rudimentary elements of a civilization which most people only knew by hearsay.In this way did the Papacy, the executive head of the entire Church, make use of all the manifold forces of the human spirit.

The practical man of affairs was given quite as much of an opportunity to distinguish himself as the dreamer who found happiness in the silence of the woods.There was no lost motion. Nothing was allowed to go to waste. And the result was such an increase of power that soon neither emperor nor king could afford to rule his realm without paying humble attention to the wishes of those of his subjects who confessed themselves the followers of the Christ.

The way in which the final victory was gained is not without interest. For it shows that the triumph of Christianity was due to practical causes and was not(as is sometimes believed) the result of a sudden and overwhelming outburst of religious ardour.

The last great persecution of the Christians took place under the Emperor Diocletian.

Curiously enough, Diocletian was by no means one of the worst among those many potentates who ruled Europe by the grace of their bodyguards. But he suffered from a complaint which, alas! is quite common among those who are called upon to govern the human race. He was densely ignorant upon the subject of elementary economics.

He found himself possessed of an Empire that was rapidly going to pieces. Having spent all his life in the army, he believed the weak point lay in the organization of the Roman military system, which entrusted the defences of the outlying districts to colonies of soldiers who had gradually lost the habit of fighting and had become peaceful rustics, selling cabbages and carrots to the very barbarians whom they were supposed to keep at a safe distance from the frontiers.

It was impossible for Diocletian to change this venerable system. He therefore tried to solve the difficulty by creating a new field army, composed o young and agile men who at a few weeks' notice could be marched to any particular part of the empire that was threatened with an invasion.

This was a brilliant idea, but like all brilliant ideas of a military nature it cost an awful lot of money. This money had to be produced in the form of taxes by the people in the interior of the country. As was to be expected, they raised a great hue and cry and claimed that they could not pay another denarius without going stony broke. The Emperor answered that they were mistaken and bestowed upon his tax-gatherers certain powers thus far only possessed by the hangman. But all to no avail. For the subjects, rather than work at a regular trade which assured them a deficit at the end of a year's hard work, deserted house and home and family and herds and flocked to the cities or became tramps. His Majesty, however, did not believe in half-way measures, and he solved the difficulty by a decree which shows how completely the old Roman Republic had degenerated into an Oriental despotism.By a stroke of his pen he made all government offices and all forms of handicraft and commerce hereditary professions. That is to say, the sons of officers were supposed to become officers, whether they liked it or not. The sons of bakers must themselves become bakers, although they might have greater aptitude for music or pawnbroking. The sons of sailors were foredoomed to a life on shipboard, even if they were seasick when they rowed across the Tiber. And finally,the day labourers, although technically they continued to be freemen, were constrained to live and die on the same piece of soil on which they had been born and were henceforth nothing but a very ordinary variety of slaves.

To expect that a ruler who had such supreme confidence in his own ability either could or would tolerate the continued existence of a relatively small number of people who only obeyed such parts of his regulations and edicts as pleased them would be absurd. But, in judging Diocletian for his harshness in dealing with the Christians, we must remember that he was fighting with his back against the wall and that he had good cause to suspect the loyalty of several million of his subjects who profited by the measures he had taken for their protection but refused to carry their share of the common burden.

You will remember that the earliest Christians had not taken the trouble to write anything down. They expected the world to come to an end at almost any moment. Therefore why waste time and money upon literary efforts which in less than ten years would he consumed by the fire from Heaven? But when the New Zion failed to materialize and when the story of Christ (after a hundred years of patient waiting) was beginning to be repeated with such strange additions and variations that a true disciple hardly knew what to believe and what not, the need was felt for some authentic book upon the subject, and a number of short biographies of Jesus and such of the original letters of the apostles as had been preserved were combined into one large volume which was called the New Testament.

This book contained among others a chapter called the Book of the Revelation and therein were to be found certain references and certain prophecies about and anent a city built on "seven mountains." That Rome was built on seven hills had been a commonly known, fact ever since the days of Romulus. It is true that the anonymous author of this curious chapter carefully called the city of his abomination Babylon.But it took no great degree of perspicacity on the part of the imperial magistrate to understand what was meant when he read these pleasant references to the"Mother of Harlots" and the "Abominations of the Earth," the town that was drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrs, foredoomed to become the habitation of all devils, the home of every foul spirit, the cage of every unclean and hateful bird, and more expressions of a similar and slightly uncomplimentary nature.

Such sentences might have been explained away as the ravings of a poor fanatic, blinded by pity and rage as he thought of his many friends who had been killed during the last fifty years. But they were part of the solemn services of the Church. Week after week they were repeated in those places where the Christians came together, and it was no more than natural that outsiders should think that they represented the true sentiments of all Christians toward the mighty city on the Tiber. I do not mean to imply that the Christians may not have had excellent reason to feel the way they did, but we can hardly blame Diocletian because he failed to share their enthusiasm.

But that was not all.

The Romans were becoming increasingly familiar with an expression which the world thus far had never heard. That was the word 'heretics.' Originally the name 'heretic' was given only to those people who had 'chosen' to believe certain doctrines, or, as we would say, a 'sect.' But gradually the meaning had narrowed down to those who had chosen to believe certain doctrines which were not held to be 'correct' or'sound' or 'true' or 'orthodox' by the duly established authorities of the Church, and which therefore, to use the language of the Apostles, were "heretical, unsound,false, and eternally wrong."

The few Romans who still clung to the ancient faith were technically free from the charge of heresy because they had remained outside of the fold of the Church and therefore could not, strictly speaking, be held to account for their private opinions. All the same,it did not flatter the Imperial pride to read in certain parts of the New Testament that heresy was as terrible an evil as adultery, uncleanness, lasciviousness,idolatry, witchcraft, wrath, strife, murder, sedition, and drunkenness, and a few other things which common decency prevents me from mentioning on this page.

All this led to friction and misunderstanding, and friction and misunderstanding led to persecution; once more Roman jails were filled with Christian prisoners and Roman executioners added to the number of Christian martyrs and a great deal of blood was shed and nothing was accomplished. Finally Diocletian, in utter despair, went back to his home town of Salona on the Dalmatian coast, retired from the business of ruling and devoted himself exclusively to the even more exciting pastime of raising big cabbages in his backyard.

His successor did not continue the policy of repression. On the contrary, since he could not hope to eradicate the Christian evil by force, he decided to make the best of a bad bargain and gain the goodwill of his enemies by offering them some special favours.This happened in the year 313, and the honour of having been the first to 'recognize' the Christian Church officially belongs to a man by the name of Constantine.

Some day we shall possess an International Board of Revisioning Historians before whom all emperors,kings, pontiffs, presidents, and mayors who now enjoy the title of the 'great' shall have to submit their claims for this specific qualification. One of the candidates who will have to be watched very carefully when he appears before this tribunal is the aforementioned Emperor Constantine.

This wild Serbian who had wielded a spear on every battlefield of Europe, from York in England to Byzantium on the shores of the Bosphorus, was among other things the murderer of his wife, the murderer of his brother-in-law, the murderer of his nephew(a boy of seven), and the executioner of several other relatives of minor degree and importance.Nevertheless and notwithstanding, because in a moment of panic just before he marched against his most dangerous rival, Maxentius, he had made a bold bid for Christian support, he gained great fame as the "second Moses," and was ultimately elevated to sainthood both by the Armenian and by the Russian Churches. That he lived and died a barbarian who had outwardly accepted Christianity, yet until the end of his days tried to read the riddle of the future from the steaming entrails of sacrificial sheep, was most considerately overlooked in view of the famous Edict of Tolerance by which the Emperor guaranteed unto his beloved Christian subjects the right to "freely profess their private opinions and to assemble in their meeting-place without fear of molestation."

For the leaders of the Church in the first half of the fourth century, as I have repeatedly stated before, were practical politicians, and when they had finally forced the Emperor to sign this ever-memorable decree, they elevated Christianity from the rank of a minor sect to the dignity of the official Church of the State. But they knew how and in what manner this had been accomplished and the successors of Constantine knew it, and although they tried to cover it up by a display of oratorical fireworks the arrangement never quite lost its original character.

* * * * *

"Deliver me, oh mighty ruler," exclaimed Nestor the Patriarch unto Theodosius the Emperor, "deliver me of all the enemies of my Church and in return I will give thee Heaven. Stand by me in pulling down those who disagree with our doctrines and we in turn will stand by thee in putting down thine enemies."

There have been other bargains during the history of the lust twenty centuries.

But few have been so brazen as the compromise by which Christianity came to power. Y6MAOI7dsgbXMpE5QvuGO0R3MF9aYnzEKHqSN4LqlMfWxH/GJkE8vAYPm70i1ymG