Hence, however bad the condition of the church is represented to be by ecclesiastical writers, we must know that it was still worse than that; however numerous the schisms; however unholy the ambition of aspiring prelates; however frequent and serious the innovations upon the primitive ordinances of the gospel; however great the confusion and apostasy in the church is represented to be; we must know that it is still worse than that, since the church historians contemporaneous with the events refused to record these things in their fullness lest it should prove disastrous to the church; just as some of our modern scholars professing to write church history express their determination to close their eyes to the corruption and abuses which form the greater part of the melancholy story of ecclesiastical history, for fear that relating these things would make it appear that real religion scarcely had any existence. [9] But it is all in vain. "It is idle, it is disingenuous," remarks the editor [10] of Gibbon's great work, "to deny or to dissemble the early depravations of Christianity, its gradual but rapid departure from its primitive simplicity and purity, still more from its spirit of universal love." If the intermittent peace accorded to the church in the first three troubled centuries of its existence was productive of the evils admitted by the writers who have felt that the cause of religion demanded that these evils as much as possible should be covered up, naturally enough one exclaims, what then must have been the result of that repose which came to the church after the elevation of Constantine to the imperial throne! When from a proscribed religion Christianity was exalted to the dignity of the state religion of the empire; and her prelates and clergy, recalled from exile and suffering, poverty and disgrace, were loaded with the wealth and the honors that the lords of the Roman world could bestow! Let imagination do her best or worst in picturing the rapid decline of whatever remained of true Christianity, conjecture can scarcely outrun the facts. If when the office of bishop was attended with danger and scant revenues it aroused the inordinate ambition of men to possess it, how infinitely more must it have become the object of envy, strife and ambition when by the patronage of Constantine it became not only free from danger but endowed with revenues that a prince might envy, and accorded an influence in the palace scarcely second to that granted to the governors of the provinces!