When contrasting the course of the first Christian emperor with the pagan emperors, Eusebius says, "They commanded the temples to be magnificently adorned; he demolished them to the foundation, especially such as were most respected by superstitious people." [113] Later he expressly says that throughout the whole Roman empire, the doors of idolatry were shut to the commonalty and to the soldiery, and that "every kind of sacrifice was prohibited." Again he says, that there were several laws published for these purposes, forbidding sacrifices, divinations, raising statues, and the secret mysteries or rites of initiation. And he says further, that "in Egypt a sort of priesthood, consecrated to the honor of the Nile, was entirely suppressed." [114] I am not unmindful that some respectable authorities question if Constantine really departed from the policy of toleration announced in his edict of Milan; and that even Gibbon is inclined to believe in his toleration of {LXIV} paganism. The statement here made by Eusebius, the contemporary and biographer of Constantine, however, together with reference to the edicts of suppression quoted by his son Constans in the succeeding reign, and which is quoted by Lardner, [115] establishes beyond question the policy of intolerance of Constantine toward paganism. Especially when what Eusebius has said is supplemented by the fact that the emperor destroyed a number of heathen temples, and peremptorily ordered the closing of the others. Among the heathen temples destroyed was one at Aegae, in Cilicia, erected to Aesculapius, celebrated for the number of sick that had been healed there, and held in high esteem by men of the better class among the pagans and philosophers. It is said that by its destruction and the public exhibition of certain images of the gods, many tricks of the priests were exposed and became objects of sport to the populace. [116] But while this may have been the conduct of some insincere pagans, those who remained heathens, as LeClerc has well said, "were no doubt extremely shocked at the manner in which the statues of their gods were treated; and could not consider the Christians as men of moderation. For, in short, those statues were as dear to them, as anything, the most sacred, could be to the Christians." [117] Eusebius taunted the philosophers about the destruction of the temple, without any interference on the part of the god to whom it had been erected, apparently all unmindful of the fact that just such taunts had been hurled at the Christian martyrs in the days that the "kingdom of God suffered violence, and the violent took it by force." "Had not Eusebius," remarked Lardner, "often heard with his own ears, and read in the history of ancient martyrs, the insults and triumphs of the heathens over the Christians, that they professed themselves the worshipers of the great and only true God, and yet everybody, that pleased, was able to molest and destroy them, as he saw good?" [118]