rich purple cloth, heavily embroidered with gold, blazing with jewels, and bearing the busts of Constantine and his sons. It suggested the Cross just as much but no more than did the ordinary cavalry standards of the Roman armies; the sacred monogram alone indicated the supreme change which had come over the Emperor, who, in answer to his prayer, had thus found that the single Deity which his father, Constantius, had worshipped was none other than Christ, the God of the Christians. For the Emperor, desiring to know more of the Cross and the Christ, summoned certain Christian teachers in his camp to explain these things more fully to him, and they told him that “Christ was God, the only begotten Son of the one true God, and that the vision he had seen was the symbol of immortality and of the victory which Christ had won over death.” Such, according to Eusebius, was the conversion of Constantine, and such was the Emperor’s own account of the circumstances which led up to it. This was the official story, as it might have appeared in a Roman Court Circular at the time when Eusebius wrote. But when did Eusebius write _The Life of Constantine_, from which we have taken this narrative? Not until Constantine himself was dead, not, that is to say, until after 337, fully a quarter of a century after the event described. The date is important. In twenty-five years a story may be transfigured out of all knowledge through constant repetition by the narrator, to say nothing of the changes it suffers if it passes in active circulation from mouth to mouth. Has this been the fate of the story of the Vision of the Cross? _The Life of Constantine_ was not the first volume of contemporary history published by Eusebius. He had already written a _History of the Church_, which he issued to the world in 326. What, then, had the author to say in that year about this marvellous vision? Nothing. There is not a word about the flaming cross, or the coming of Christ to Constantine in a dream, or the fashioning of the Labarum. All Eusebius says, in his _History_, of the conversion of Constantine, is that the Emperor “piously called to his aid the God of Heaven and his son Jesus Christ.” It is a strange silence. If the heavenly cross had been seen by the whole army; if the current version of the story had been the same in 326 as it was in 337, it is at least difficult to understand why Eusebius omitted all mention of an event which must have been the talk of the whole Roman world and must have made the heart of every Christian exult. Such manifest signs from Heaven were scarcely so common in the opening of the fourth century that an ecclesiastical historian would think any allusion to it unnecessary. The argument from silence is never absolutely conclusive, but the reticence of Eusebius in 326 at least warrants a strong suspicion that the legend had not then crystallised itself into its final shape.