Licinius had thus, like Maximin, made himself the champion of the old religion and the religious reactionaries. When in 323 war again broke out between himself and Constantine, it was as the professed enemy of Christianity and its God that he took the field. The war was a war of ambition on both sides, but it was also a war between the two religions. We have mentioned elsewhere the oath which Licinius took before the battle, when he vowed that if the gods gave him the victory he would extirpate root and branch the Christian religion. Fate gave him no opportunity to fulfil his promise. Defeated at Adrianople and at Chrysopolis, and then exiled to Thessalonica, Licinius had not many months to live. Before he died he saw his pagan councillors pay for their folly with their lives and heard the rejoicings of the Christians of the East at the fall of the last of their pagan persecutors. The Church at last had won her freedom and was to suffer at the hands of the State no more. Eusebius has fortunately preserved for us the text of the edict addressed by Constantine after his victory to the inhabitants of Palestine, recalling from exile, from the mines, and from servitude the Christian victims of the recent persecution, restoring their property to those who had suffered confiscation, offering to soldiers who had been expelled in disgrace from the army either a return to their old rank or the certificate of honourable discharge, and giving back to the churches without diminution the corporate possessions of which they had been robbed. Constantine not merely passed the sponge over the administrative acts of Licinius: he granted large subsidies to the bishops who had suffered at the hands of “the dragon,” and himself wrote to “his dearest beloved brother,” Eusebius of Cæsarea, urging him to see that the bishops, elders, and deacons in his neighbourhood were “active and enthusiastic in the work of the Church.”[78] ----- Footnote 78: σπουδάζειν περὶ τὰ ἔργα τῶν ἐκκλησιῶν.—_De Vita Const._, ii., 46. ----- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ [Illustration] CHAPTER IX CONSTANTINE AND THE DONATISTS If Constantine hoped that by the Edict of Milan he had stilled the voice of religious controversy, he was speedily disillusioned. He was now to find the peace of the Church violently disturbed by those belonging to her communions, and the hatreds of Christians against one another almost as menacing to the tranquillity of the imperial rule as had been the bitter strife of pagan and Christian. In the same year (313) he received an appeal from certain African bishops imploring him to appoint a commission of Gallican bishops to settle certain difficulties which had arisen in Africa. The Donatist schism, which was destined to last for more than a century, had begun.