So thoroughly indifferent to all sense of religion was this greatest of the rulers of mankind that dissimulation was an easy task which involved no conscientious scruples of any kind; and was so gracefully and perfectly enacted that even Eusebius, the father of ecclesiastical history, himself no ordinary man, was for a long time very thoroughly deceived into believing that the atheistic emperor was God’s vicegerent for the establishment of the Christian Church on earth. "Constantine, therefore, in the very commencement" (says Eusebius), "being proclaimed supreme emperor and Augustus by the soldiers, and much longer before this by the universal sovereign, God--Constantine, the protector of the good, combining his hatred of wickedness with the love of goodness, went forth with his son Crispus, the most benevolent Cæsar, to extend a caring arm to all them that were perishing. Both, therefore, the father and the son, having, as it were, God the Universal King and his Son, our Saviour, as their leader and aid, drawing up the army on all sides against the enemies of God, bore away an easy victory." "With choirs and hymns," says Eusebius, "in the cities and villages, at the same time they celebrated and extolled first of all God the Universal King, because they were thus taught; then they also celebrated the praises of the pious emperor, and with him all his divinely-favored children," including Crispus Cæsar whom he caused to be murdered afterward. Only the lone and incorruptible seer of Patmos, John the Divine, foresaw the mighty pagan in his real character, and depicted him in words of scathing denunciation and rebuke which the prostituted Church then failed to understand when the things were transacted before her eyes--a prophetic and apocalyptic view of Constantine and Constantinople which becomes of easier interpretation as the centuries glide away, revealing more and more clearly what things John foretold, that were to follow upon the subversion of Christianity by the most potent human enemy that Jesus ever had, and locating the seat of Antichrist upon seven hills above the sea to which the commerce of the world resorted--a description inapplicable to any capital on earth except the city of Constantinople.