form an opinion if we look a little more closely at the religious life and policy of Constantine. Eusebius represents the daily life of the Emperor on its religious side to have been almost that of a monk or of a saint. Every day, we are told, he used to retire for private meditation and prayer. He delighted in delivering sermons and addresses to his courtiers, Bible in hand. He would begin by exposing the errors of polytheism and by proving the superstition of the Gentiles to be a mere fraud and cloak for impiety, and would then expound his theory of the sole sovereignty of God, the workings of Providence, and the sureness of the Judgment, invariably concluding with his favourite moral that God had given to him the sovereignty of the whole world. Such a discourse could not possibly be short, but Constantine liked his religious exercises long. He once insisted on standing throughout the reading of an elaborate disquisition by Eusebius himself, who evidently tired of the exertion and begged that the Emperor would not fatigue himself further. But Constantine was resolved to hear it out, and the courtier Bishop, while profoundly flattered at the compliment, ruefully admitted that the thesis was very long. Probably the courtiers found it interminable. But it was their duty to listen, applaud, and appear duly impressed when, for example, Constantine traced on the ground the dimensions of a coffin, and solemnly warned them against covetousness by the reminder that six feet of earth was the utmost they could hope to enjoy after death, and they might not even get so much as that if burial were refused them or they were burnt or lost at sea. No one ever accused Constantine of covetousness; his failing was reckless extravagance, and we fear he is to be numbered among those who “Compound for sins they are inclined to By damning those they have no mind to.” Constantine ordered all the bishops throughout the Empire to offer up daily prayers for him; he had coins struck at the Imperial mints which depicted him with eyes uplifted to heaven, and he had pictures of himself—probably in mosaic—set over the gates of his palaces, in which he was seen standing erect with hands in the attitude of prayer. For our part we like better the chapters in which Eusebius describes the Emperor’s open-handed generosity to the poor and needy and to the orphan and the widow, extols the kind-heartedness which was carried to such a length as to raise the question whether such clemency was not excessive, and claims that his most distinctive and characteristic virtue was the love of his fellow-men, his φιλανθρώπια, a virtue which the typical Roman rarely developed to his full capacity.