Then Constantine cried out: "Answer thou the bishop!" Then, still quietly and pleasantly, with a peculiar, mesmeric light in his somber eyes, and strange, thrilling sibilation in his penetrating voice, Arius arose and said: "By the command of Augustus I answer that I have not censured the emperor, nor condemned the council. As to my being a heretic, I only reply that, if this thing be true, it is no concern of the emperor’s, who hath never been ordained to be the keeper of my conscience. It is an affair entirely between the Master--Christ--and his servant Arius. For ye all do know that there is no Roman law prescribing what we must believe or disbelieve, since the persecutors lost power to enforce obedience to their laws prescribing faith in false gods, by the infliction of tortures and death, against those who for conscience’ sake refused to obey. But ye know that neither Jesus nor his apostles ever denounced, nor authorized any human being to denounce, a temporal penalty for heresy; for the Church only prescribes that ye should refuse to fellowship the obdurate heretic, or disobedient person; and I trust you far enough to believe that if any pagan emperor, or any human authority, should enact laws requiring you to believe, or to do, anything contrary to good conscience, ye would be faithful Christians enough to refuse obedience to such laws, as our fathers from the beginning have gloriously done. For this is a matter between each man and his God only; not between him and the government which exercises dominion over him. This the Church hath held from the beginning; and when the heathen laws did prescribe that ye who are here assembled should do and believe things contrary to Christ and to conscience, ye did refuse, so that every bishop here, except those eleven who come from the remotest East, hath endured tortures rather than obey the human laws. If, therefore, I be a heretic, as brother Marcellus of Ancyra ignorantly supposeth, what have the empire or its laws to do with that? Why speak ye of orthodoxy, or of heterodoxy, in a great royal, political assembly like this; unless, perhaps, some of ye are willing to believe that the great and powerful emperor is also a god, having charge of your faith and conscience, as well as of your political condition; so that what the law of Constantine shall prescribe as right to be believed and done shall be your rule of faith and practice, and not what our Lord Christ hath prescribed? For me, a poor presbyter of the Christian Church, to assume the right to deliberate upon and prescribe laws for the empire would be gross impudence and arrogance; for any human authority to usurp the right to make laws controlling the faith of Christ’s Church, would be as gross a sacrilege. Was Constantine crucified for you? Or were ye baptized into his name? And do ye hope for salvation by faith in and obedience to him? I was not. I have come, therefore, hither in obedience to the imperial