"That might be so upon the land," murmured Constantine, absently, "for many of my legions are veterans, who have followed me through seventeen campaigns without defeat, and the Goths are brave and hardy. But the old emperor’s vast superiority is on the sea. For, since Rome ceased to be the seat of empire, the naval establishments of Misenum and Ravenna have been greatly neglected, and the maritime cities of Greece no longer furnish those formidable fleets which made the republic of Athens so famous. But the Emperor Licinius can draw from Egypt and the adjacent coasts of Africa, from the ports of Phoenicia and the Isle of Cyprus, and from Bithynia, Ionia, and Caria, a fleet to which the rest of mankind could offer no effective opposition; so that, if I should be successful on land, the emperor’s naval superiority would enable him to carry an offensive war into every sea-coast of Hispania, Gaul, and Italy, cut off all my supplies, and force me to retreat even in the face of victory. It will not do!" he cried, passionately and despondingly--"it will not do! and it requires years to prepare a navy! There must be some other way--some other way!" What dark and secret thought slumbered in the capacious deeps of that calm, unwavering spirit to which expediency was ever a sufficient justification for any crime that might advance political designs, no man can ever know; but Eusebius at once perceived that the thing which he supposed to have been a suggestion of his own--a temptation held out by him to the emperor and ventured upon because his zeal for the persecuted Christians of the Eastern Church made him earnestly desire that Constantine should conquer and protect those regions--had in truth long been a subject of profoundest meditation in the emperor’s soul; a most dangerous ambition, which he had considered in every possible aspect of it. Neither of these able men spoke for some time. Then the emperor said, musingly: "Would that it were possible for me at this time to occupy the same relation to the Eastern Churches that so happily obtains in the Empire of the West! But there must be some other way--some other way!" Eusebius perceived from the repetition of these words that they in some way contained the particular matter concerning which Constantine desired him to speak; and he shuddered at the unwelcome thought of what might possibly be required at the hand of some bishop of the Church by the implacable and unscrupulous emperor; but, not fully comprehending the drift of the royal mind, he answered: "It would be easy to attach the bishops and their congregations unto thyself as thou didst those of Africa, by secret aid to the churches, and by kind messages unto those who have experienced the tyrant’s cruelty; for already all Christians regard thee as divinely raised up for their succor, and they are comforted by the hope that, when thou dost rule the world, the gospel shall be as free in the East as it is in the West."