Then, with a singular smile that had in its beauty and light something of lofty mournfulness, the emperor answered: "And if I should do so, dear bishop, what then? Jesus hath no power against me except through thaumaturgy, and thou dost know that thaumaturgy faded out when the Church abandoned that communal system upon which Arius insisteth yet so manfully. I have made my choice, and will abide the issue, bishop. Thou knowest that I never was baptized. I might have been a Christian, but I preferred to reign over the Roman Empire; and I will reign until the end." Ah! for him, then, with all the glad assurance born of utter ignorance that such a being could exist among mankind, the bishop had carefully freighted "the old ship Zion" with the godless furniture of Roman law and custom, its statutes of slavery, its laws and usages of war and conquest, its idolatrous system of private-property rights, titles, prerogatives, political and social class distinctions between those whom God made to be brethren, out of which idolatry the sorrow of the world had grown, from all of which Jesus had died to ransom a fallen race. He had unwittingly launched the freighted ship upon the troubled sea of earthly politics. Thinking that he would win the Roman Empire for the Church, he had betrayed and sold the cause of Christ to Constantine. Thinking that he guided and controlled the emperor, he had labored with all diligence to make himself the master’s slave. He knew it now only too well--he knew that Constantine had always known it; and, appalled by the vast resources of that greatest of mankind, crushed by the sense of his amazing genius, he seemed unto himself to grow small, contemptible, and weak. And the ship of the Church? Would she go down forever in the troubled waters, amid the stormy strife for worldly gains and power? Or would she yet, somehow, sometime, somewhere, outride the tempests, and in some unknown and distant clime reach into a safe haven? "Not in my time," said Constantine; "not while I live!" When, then?