=1. How the new faith spread among the Heathen.=――Whilst the growth from the seed which Moses had sown was being threshed out in the schools, the gleanings of the apostle Paul were being garnered as harvest in high places. The new religion had made progress in its first three hundred years of existence, but without the practice of universal love which it professed to teach. The Christian command, ‘Love one another,’ was being, indeed, even less generally obeyed three hundred years after the death of Jesus than had been the Mosaic injunction on which it was founded, ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself,’ three hundred years after the death of Moses. But notwithstanding that sects in Christianity were already both plentiful and pugnacious, the new faith was driving paganism to the wall, and it is not difficult to understand how it was that this had come about. To Jews, the dogma of a Trinity was, and always is, unthinkable; but to heathens it was a welcome thinning of the ranks of their crowded Olympus. Christianity gave them a much purer and simpler idea of Divinity than they had hitherto held, and such selections from the old morality as they were bidden to accept with the new doctrine were not of an irksome sort. All the observances, and many of the restraints, of the Jewish Law, Paul, we know, had cast aside, and thus his teaching had been well received by the heathen almost from the first. Paul was accommodating, and proselytes in the early days had been won by persuasion; but Christianity, grown stronger, had grown aggressive, and by the end of the third century it had become a political as well as a religious danger to pagan supremacy. In the year 306, when Constantine, after a struggle, had succeeded in gaining the imperial dignity, he clearly saw the advantage which putting himself at the head of the Christian party would secure to him. He faced both ways for a while, but before the end of his reign Christianity was the state religion of Rome. =2. The First Christian Emperor.=――Constantine was sixty-two years old at the time of his formal conversion. He had been a quite comfortable heathen all these sixty-two years, and on his accession had ruled at first with fairness and justice. But when political motives, and his mother, the Empress Helena, who was an ardent believer in the new doctrine, had united to make him change his faith, he changed with it his character. He became both cruel and unjust. It seemed as if he really could not understand why, if he were converted, pagans, or Jews either, should remain unconverted. He never could grasp the fact that he, in his unconverted state, had been a heathen; whilst the Jews, in their unconverted state, were Jews. But this really made all the difference.