Even the Church of Rome goes farther in regard to the pretended virtue of her expiatory practices, than the Pagans ever went. Indeed, it was a common thing among the Pagans to stigmatize certain crimes, and to call them irremissible--unexpiable. They excluded from the sanctuaries of Eleusis, the murderers, the traitors to their country, in a word, all those who were guilty of atrocious crimes; they were to be excluded from the Elysium forever, and to be endlessly tortured in the Tartarus. There were purifications for murder, it is true, but only for involuntary or necessary murder. When the ancient heroes had committed a murder, they resorted to expiation; after the sacrifices which were required, lustral water was poured on the murderous hand; from that moment they were readmitted in society; and they prepared themselves to new deeds of bravery. Hercules resorted to expiation when he had slain the Centaurs. But those sorts of expiations did not purify the soul from all impurities and crimes. The great criminals had to dread all their lifetime the horrors of the Tartarus, or could not expiate their crimes, except by constantly practicing virtue, and constantly doing good to their fellow men. The legal purifications were not considered as having the virtue of securing to all criminals the hope of bliss, to which the righteous were entitled. Nero did not dare present himself to the temple of Eleusis; because he was debarred from entering its sanctuary on account of his atrocious crimes. The famous Constantine I., to whom the Church of Rome is indebted for all her past and present aggrandizement, wealth, and power; and whose name has been, is, and shall always be, accursed by nations, because of the rivers of blood, of the deluge of ignorance, of superstition, in one word, of the ocean of crimes against God, against Christ, and against mankind, which the Church of Rome, enabled by his protection, poured over the world: Constantine, we say, guilty of all sorts of crimes; his hands reeking with the blood of his own mother, whom he had slain; and with the blood of the many, whom he had murdered; and guilty of many perjuries, presented himself to the Pagan priests to obtain the absolution of those atrocious crimes, and the exemption from their punishment.