Still, the emperor did not dissolve the assembly, and, in order to gain over the personal affection even of those who had most stubbornly resisted his sacrilegious domination of the council, he provided a magnificent banquet for the members thereof, and lavished upon them every mark of love and honor. He lodged the one-eyed, hamstrung old Paphnutius in his own palace, "and often sent for him to hear the story of his persecutions; and now it was remarked how he would throw his arms round the old man, and put his lips to his eyeless socket as if to suck out with his reverential kiss the blessing which, as it were, lurked in the sacred cavity, and stroked down with his imperial hand the frightful wound; how he pressed his legs and arms, and the royal purple, to the paralyzed limbs, and put his own eyeball into the socket." And, because those maimed and tortured members of the council who had been "confessors" enjoyed the reputation of especial sanctity and honor throughout the Church, Constantine used the same disgusting demagogy in his dealings with them all, and fawned upon and flattered them in the name of Jesus, until he believed he had stolen for himself their influence in aiding him to eradicate primitive Christianity out of the East, as he had already done in the West, and so banishing the kingdom of heaven from the face of the earth; and so nourishing in the very bosom of the Church, maintained and governed by imperial authority, the ancient crimes of war, slavery, and mammon-worship, perpetuating the bondage of the people unto the ruling classes, and giving the sanction of religion to class distinctions between men and families, based upon this idolatry, which had been always the curse of human life. And for a whole year Constantine pursued his purpose quietly, unceasingly, intelligently, by the use of a thousand different means and agencies, to reduce the East to a condition of ecclesiastical serfdom to his authority, and to confirm, popularize, and consolidate his power. But the slow, doubtful, hesitating adoption of the imperial church by the Christians of Armenia, and to a less degree by those of Syria, Egypt, and the Gothic provinces along the Danube, to whom he had sent back their teacher Ulfilas after ordaining him to be a royal bishop, inspired the emperor with misgivings of the future, and with an almost unreasoning jealousy and hatred of Crispus Cæsar, his son, who was the favorite of all those regions, and of Licinius, who represented the family of the legitimate sovereign thereof, whom Constantine had dethroned and destroyed.