His Piety Set Against the Wickedness of the Persecutors

In this way the spirit who hates what is good, moved by envy at the blessings the church enjoyed, kept stirring up against her the stormy troubles of strife within, in the middle of a time of peace and joy. Meanwhile, however, the emperor whom God favored did not neglect the duties that were his. In all his conduct he showed the direct opposite of the atrocities the cruel tyrants had lately been guilty of, and so he triumphed over every enemy who opposed him. [a]

For in the first place, the tyrants, who were themselves estranged from the true God, had used every kind of compulsion to enforce the worship of false gods. Constantine convinced humankind, by actions as well as words, that these gods existed only in imagination, and urged them to acknowledge the only true God. They had mocked his Christ with words of blasphemy; he took as his safeguard the very thing against which they aimed their blasphemies, and gloried in the symbol of the Savior’s suffering. They had persecuted the servants of Christ and driven them from house and home; he called every one of them back and restored them to their native homes. They had heaped dishonor on them; he made their condition honorable and enviable in the eyes of all. They had shamefully plundered and sold the goods of godly people; Constantine not only made good the loss but enriched them still further with generous gifts. They had spread harmful slanders against the prelates of the church through their written decrees; he, on the contrary, honored these men with marks of his personal regard, and by his edicts and statutes raised them to higher standing than before. They had utterly demolished the houses of prayer and leveled them to the ground; he ordered that those still standing be enlarged, and that new ones be built on a magnificent scale at the cost of the imperial treasury. They had ordered the inspired Scriptures to be burned and utterly destroyed; he decreed that copies of them be multiplied and splendidly adorned at the cost of the imperial treasury. They had strictly forbidden the prelates to hold synods anywhere or at any time; he, by contrast, gathered them to his court from every province, received them into his palace, and even into his own private rooms, and thought them worthy to share his home and his table.

They had honored the demons with offerings; Constantine exposed their error, and kept handing over the materials for sacrifice, now useless, to people who would put them to better use. They had ordered the pagan temples to be lavishly adorned; he leveled to their foundations those that had been the chief objects of superstitious reverence. They had subjected God’s servants to the most shameful punishments; he took vengeance on the persecutors and inflicted just punishment on them in the name of God, while he held the memory of his holy martyrs in constant veneration. They had driven God’s worshipers out of the imperial palaces; he placed full confidence in them at all times, knowing them to be better disposed and more faithful than anyone else. They, the slaves of greed, had willingly brought on themselves, as it were, the torments of Tantalus; he, with royal magnificence, unlocked all his treasures and handed out his gifts with rich and generous liberality. They had committed countless murders in order to plunder or confiscate the wealth of their victims; but throughout the reign of Constantine the sword of justice hung idle everywhere, and both the people and the town councilors in every province were governed by fatherly authority rather than by force.

Surely it must seem to everyone who weighs these facts properly that a new and fresh age of existence had begun to appear, and that a light never known before had suddenly dawned on the human race out of the darkness. And all must confess that these things were entirely the work of God, who raised up this devout emperor to stand against the multitude of the ungodly.