out, would have been able to save them from prosecution; and prosecution was invariably followed by the breaking up of their homes, by rigorous imprisonment, confiscation of their property, loss of rank and position, too often by torture and death.
To turn once more to the sterner and smaller school of "Rigourists," for these, after all, were "les âmes d'élite" of the Christians in the first three centuries; in later times such men and women possibly were termed fanatics, they have been often branded as wild and unpractical persons; but it was to these heroic souls after all that in great measure Christianity owed its final victory.
The wonderful and rapid spread of Christianity noticeable after the Milan toleration Edict of Constantine, A.D. 313, has often been commented upon with surprise. From being a persecuted and despised cult, Christianity became, long before the fourth century had run its course, the religion of the Empire; it had previously gained evidently the hearts of the people in well-nigh all the provinces of the mighty Empire.
Now no imperial edicts—no mere favour and patronage of the Emperor and his court, could ever have won for Christianity that widespread and general acceptance among the people so noticeable within fifty years of the Milan proclamation of Constantine.[1] Something more was needed. For a little over two hundred years the Christians had been sowing the seeds of a new and nobler view of life—"it had gradually taught the supreme sanctity of love—it had presented an ideal destined for centuries to draw around it all that was greatest as well as all that was noblest on earth; and one great cause of its success was that it produced more heroic actions and formed more upright men than any other creed. . . . Noble lives crowned by heroic deaths were the best arguments of the infant Church."[2]
- ↑ The edicts favourable to Christianity were quietly received, even approved, in many places warmly welcomed; and vast and ever increasing numbers of the population, hitherto pagans, joined the Christian communities. The enormous and seemingly sudden increase in the number of Christians in the Roman Empire in the latter years of the third and in the fourth centuries, is a problem which even now is something of a mystery to some historians.
- ↑ See Lecky, Hist. of Morals, chap. iii.
