The History of Christianity, John S. C. Abbott [ebook reader browser .txt] 📗
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The city of Rome for a long time had ceased to be the only capital; and Constantine chose, with great sagacity, Byzantium, at the mouth of the Bosphorus, as the new capital, giving it the name of Constantinople, after himself. This imperial city enjoyed a very salubrious clime, and occupied a position, for the accumulation of wealth and the exercise of power, unsurpassed by that of any other spot upon the globe. It was situated upon an eminence which commanded an extensive view of the shores of Europe and Asia, with the beautiful Straits of the Bosphorus flowing down from the Black Sea on the north, emptying into the Sea of Marmora, and thence descending through the Dardanelles, or Hellespont, to the Mediterranean on the south. These were avenues of approach through which no foe could penetrate. The city was favored with a harbor, called the Golden Horn, spacious and secure. The site of Constantinople seems to have been designed by Nature for the metropolis of universal European dominion.
The wealth, energy, and artistic genius of the whole Roman empire were immediately called into requisition to enlarge and beautify the new metropolis. The boundaries of the city were marked out fourteen miles in circumference. Almost incredible sums of money were expended in rearing the city walls, and in works of public utility and beauty. The forests which then frowned unbroken along the shores of the Euxine Sea afforded an inexhaustible supply of timber. A quarry of white marble, easily accessible, upon a neighboring island, furnished any desired amount of that important building-material.
The imperial palace soon rose in splendor which Rome had never surpassed. With its courts, gardens, porticoes, and baths, it covered several acres. The ancient cities of the empire, including Rome itself, were despoiled of their noble families, who were persuaded to remove to the new metropolis to add lustre to its society. Magnificent mansions were reared for them. The revenues of wide domains were assigned for the support of their dignity. Thus the splendors of decaying Rome upon the Tiber were eclipsed by the rising towers of Constantinople upon the Bosphorus.
Few men have been more warmly applauded, or more bitterly condemned, than Constantine. Fifteen centuries have passed away since his death, and still he is the subject of the most venomous denunciation and the most impassioned praise. He was in person tall, graceful, majestic, with features of the finest mould. Intellectually he was also highly endowed. None of the ordinary vices of the times stained his character. Conscious of his superior abilities, and sustained by the popular voice, he pursued a career to which we find no parallels in history.
The Arian controversy was now greatly agitating the Church. The emperor, having in vain endeavored to quiet it by a letter, decided to call an ecumenical council; that is, a general council of bishops from all parts of the world. It was a measure then without an example.
The city of Nice, one of the principal cities of Bithynia, was selected for the assembly. Three hundred and eighteen bishops met, besides a large number of subordinate ecclesiastics. The emperor defrayed the necessary expenses of the members of the council. The session was opened on the 19th of June, in the year of our Lord 325. The meeting was held in the large saloon of the palace, with benches arranged on either side for the bishops. The members of the council first entered, and silently took their seats: they were followed by a small group of the distinguished friends of the emperor. Then, upon a given signal, all rose, and the emperor himself came in. He was robed in imperial purple, and his gorgeous attire glistened with embroidery of gems and gold. A golden throne was prepared for him at the end of the hall, where he took his seat to preside over the deliberations.
One of the most prominent of the bishops, Eustache of Antioch, then rose, and, in the name of the council, thanked the emperor for all the favors he had conferred upon Christianity. The emperor briefly replied, expressing the joy he felt in presiding over such an assembly, and his hope that they might come to a perfectly harmonious result. He spoke in Latin, his native language. An interpreter repeated his words in Greek for the benefit of those who were most familiar with that language.
The council continued in session until the 25th of August,—sixty-seven days. The principal, the almost exclusive attention of the council was directed to the new doctrine of Arius,—that Christ, the Son, was not equal to the Father, but was created by him, and was subordinate to him. The decision of the council, called the Nicene Creed, rebuked, in the most emphatic terms, the Arian doctrine as heresy. Its language upon this point was as follows:—
“We believe in one only God, Father all-powerful, Creator of all things visible and invisible; and in one only Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son, engendered of the Father (that is to say, of the substance of the Father), God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten and not made, consubstantial with the Father, through whom every thing has been made in heaven and on earth; who for us men, and for our salvation, has descended from the skies, has become incarnate and made man, has suffered, rose on the third day, ascended to the skies, and will come to judge the living and the dead.”
Thus words were heaped upon words, to express, beyond all possibility of doubt, the sense of the council of the entire equality of the Son with the Father. The Arians seemed disposed to accept the same language used by the Trinitarians, while they affixed a different signification to the words.
“The bishops,” writes the Abbé Fleury, “seeing the dissimulation of the Arians, and their bad faith, were constrained, that they might express their meaning more unequivocally, to include in a single word the sense of the Scriptures, and to say that the Son is consubstantial with the Father, making use of the Greek word homoousios, which this dispute has since rendered so celebrated. They thus declared that the Son was not only like the Father, but the same,—identical with him.”
All the bishops but two signed this creed. After some conference, those two signed also.
“It is said,” writes Eusebius,—“and it is Philistorge, an Arian author, who says it,—that these two, Eusebius of Nicomedia, and Theognis of Nice, used fraud in their subscriptions, which they made together. They inserted the letter i in the word homoousios, so that it read homoiousios; which signifies similar to, not identically the same.”
The doctrine of Arius was thus condemned, as contrary to the teachings of the Scriptures, by this numerous council of pastors from all parts of the then known world. Several other subjects of minor importance were discussed, and decided upon. The Holy Spirit was declared to be also, like the Son, equal with the Father, and identically the same. The emperor wrote a letter, which was published with the decrees of council, urging that they should be accepted in all the churches. “The results,” said he, “of these sacred deliberations of the bishops, must be in accordance with the will of God.” In the most severe terms he condemned the doctrine of Arius, commanding that his writings, wherever found, should be burned. It was a dark age. Toleration was but little known. The emperor even went to the unwarrantable length of saying,—
“Whoever shall conceal any thing which Arius has written, instead of delivering it up to be burned, shall be put to death immediately upon being taken.”
Conversions from paganism were becoming frequent and numerous. Under the fostering care of the emperor, churches rose all over the land.
A tragic event in the life of this extraordinary man deserves record. His second wife was a beautiful woman named Fausta, much younger than himself. She was about the age of the emperor’s very handsome son Crispus. Fausta fell in love with the young man. Virtuously he repelled her advances. It is written,—
“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.”
Fausta rushed to Constantine, and accused Crispus of atrocious crime. The imperial father, in the frenzy of his rage, ordered his innocent son to be led instantly to execution. His headless body was hardly in the tomb ere the truth of his wife’s guilt and his son’s innocence was made known to the unhappy emperor beyond all possibility of doubt. In the delirium of his anguish, he ordered Fausta to be drowned in her bath.
Henceforward, for Constantine, life was but a dismal day. He never recovered from the gloom of these events; and it is said that he was never known to smile again. For forty days he fasted, weeping and groaning, and denying himself all comforts. He erected a golden statue to Crispus, with this simple, pathetic inscription:—
“TO MY SON, WHOM I UNJUSTLY CONDEMNED.”
The conversion of Constantine to Christianity was at first intellectual only, not the regeneration of the heart. He was a nominal Christian, believing in Christ. Still there is no evidence that he had been born again of the Holy Spirit, or that he had accepted Christ as his personal, atoning Saviour. The cares and sorrows of life tend to lead every thoughtful mind to Jesus. Constantine had become a world-weary, heart-broken old man, sixty-four years of age. Rapidly-increasing infirmities admonished him that he must soon appear before the judgment-seat of Christ,—before that Saviour whose authority his intellect had been constrained to recognize, but to whom, as yet, he had not fully surrendered his heart.
Deeply depressed in spirits, and sinking beneath his maladies, he retired to some warm springs in Asia. Death was slowly but steadily approaching. Constantine repaired to the church, and with tears and prayers, and deep searchings of soul, sought preparation to meet God. Having obtained, as he thought, assurance that his sins were forgiven, he assembled all the bishops of the neighboring churches in his palace, near the city of Nicomedia, and, with as much publicity as could be exercised without ostentation, confessed his Saviour before men, received the rite of baptism, and the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper.
Eusebius, the renowned Bishop of Nicomedia, performed the rite of baptism, and administered the sacred elements. It is to the pen of this illustrious bishop that we are indebted for most of the incidents in relation to the religious history of Constantine. From this time until his death, which occurred soon after, he seemed to live as a sincere and devout follower of the Redeemer. Eusebius says, “Constantine, on receiving baptism, determined to govern himself henceforth, in the minutest particulars, by God’s worthy laws of life.”
The emperor died at Nicomedia on the 21st of May, in the year 337. He was sixty-four years of age, and had reigned thirty-one years. This was the longest reign of any Roman emperor since the days of Augustus Cæsar. His funeral was attended with all the marks of homage which love and gratitude and imperial power could confer.
How singular and how touching are these triumphs of Christianity! The poor benighted slave in his cheerless hut, bleeding and dying beneath the lash, finds in the religion of Jesus that peace and joy to which the monarch in his palace is often a stranger. The martyr in the dungeon, wan and wasted with material misery, with pallid lips sings hallelujahs to Him who hath redeemed him to God by his blood.
The imperial Constantine, robed in the purple of nearly universal empire,
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