State is free it is difficult for the Church to escape from the interference of the Government even when the despotic ruler starts with the honest intention of respecting its liberties. Nevertheless the conception of the edict of Milan is magnificent in the breadth of its liberalism. As we read it we feel that the author of such a document must be classed with those rare minds that are centuries in advance of their age, and have the genius to adumbrate brilliant ideas the real scope of which is quite beyond their actual principles. Except for a very brief interval, the large conception of the edict of Milan was not realised even in the West before the Reformation, and indeed not then except by a few obscure separatists such as the Baptists, the early Independents and Pilgrim Fathers, and a century later the Quakers. We must come down to the Dutchman William iii. for a sovereign who really practised what Constantine so boldly sketched out in the famous edict nearly fourteen hundred years before. Meanwhile this idea has never been realised in the Eastern Churches.
In point of fact this law of religious liberty was an imperial permit, emanating from the good pleasure of Constantine. It was only the law of the empire because it was the will of the emperor. Thus from the first it rested on a very precarious basis. The world was not only not ripe for complete religious liberty; no party in State or Church was really prepared to concede it to an opponent. We can scarcely look in the fourth century for what the greater part of Christendom is not yet within measurable distance of obtaining or even desiring. Accordingly we must not be at all surprised to see that from licensing all religions—and so liberating Christianity from penal restrictions—Constantine quickly proceeds to patronising the religion he has publicly adopted, nor that the leaders of the Church gratefully accept his favours, quite blind to the fact that they are thereby selling their liberties, deliberately walking into a cage.
Constantine's favours took two forms. First, he
