How could Eusebius really have the effrontery to call a prince a
Christian who caused the temple of Concord to be rebuilt at his own
expense, as is proved by an inscription, which was read in the time of
Lelio Geraldi, in the temple of Latran? A prince who caused his son
Crispus, already honored with the title of Cæsar, to perish on a slight
suspicion of having commerce with Fausta, his stepmother; who caused
this same Fausta, to whom he was indebted for the preservation of his
life, to be suffocated in an overheated bath; who caused the emperor
Maximian Hercules, his adopted father, to be strangled; who took away
the life of the young Licinius, his nephew, who had already displayed
very good qualities; and, in short, who dishonored himself by so many
murders, that the consul Ablavius called his times Neronian? We might
add, that much dependence should not be placed on the oath of
Constantine, since he had not the least scruple in perjuring himself, by
causing Licinius to be strangled, to whom he had promised his life on
oath. Eusebius passes in silence over all the actions of Constantine
which are related by Eutropius, Zosimus, Orosius, St. Jerome, and
Aurelius Victor.
After this, have we not reason to conclude that the pretended appearance
of the cross in the sky is only a fraud which Constantine imagined to
favor the success of his ambitious enterprises? The medals of this
prince and of his family, which are found in Banduri, and in the work
entitled, "_Numismata Imperatorum Romanorum_"; the triumphal arch of
which Baronius speaks, in the inscription of which the senate and the
Roman people said that Constantine, by the direction of the Divinity,
had rid the republic of the tyrant Maxentius, and of all his faction;
finally, the statue which Constantine himself caused to be erected at
Rome, holding a lance terminating in the form of a cross, with this
inscription--as related by Eusebius: "By this saving sign, I have
delivered your city from the yoke of tyranny"--all this, I say, only
proves the immoderate pride of this artificial prince, who would
everywhere spread the noise of his pretended dream, and perpetuate the
recollection of it.
Yet, to excuse Eusebius, we must compare him to a bishop of the
seventeenth century, whom La Bruyère hesitated not to call a father of
the Church. Bossuet, at the same time that he fell so unmercifully on
the visions of the elegant and sensible Fénelon, commented himself, in
the funeral oration of Anne of Gonzaga of Cleves, on the two visions
which worked the conversion of the Princess Palatine. It was an
admirable dream, says this prelate; she thought that, walking alone in a
forest, she met with a blind man in a small cell. She comprehended that
a sense is wanting to the incredulous as well as to the blind; and at
the same time, in the midst of so mysterious a dream, she applied the
fine comparison of the blind man to the truths of religion and of the
other life.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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