That falsehood was quite the order of the day amongst the Fathers, witness the maxim of Tertullian, "_Credo quia impossibile est_;" upon which unerring rule he founded his implicit belief in the resurrection and other such miracles, that is, he believed them true, _because they were utterly impossible_. Saint Jerome accuses not only St. Paul, but Jesus Christ, of frauds. Justin Martyr speaks of the fable of the Phoenix as an incontrovertible truth. Tertullian affirms, in his usual manner, that when the Christians cast out devils, they (the devils) acknowledged themselves to be the heathen deities, Mars, Bacchus, Apollo, etc., etc. These, and such as these, are our Christian authorities! At the head of all these _Fathers of the Church_, in point of rank and pre-eminence in wickedness, stands the imperial assassin, the Emperor Constantine. As a forger and falsifier, it was not in his line to equal his protégé Eusebius; but in all the arts of dissimulation he seems not to have been his inferior. As a cool family murderer, Nero and Caligula may hide their diminished heads in his presence. He drowned his wife in boiling water; put to death his son Crispus; murdered the two husbands of his sisters, Constantia and Anastasia; murdered his own father-in-law, Maximiam Hercules; murdered his nephew, his sister Constantia's son, only twelve years of age; with some others, not so nearly related, amongst whom was Sapator, a pagan priest, who refused absolution for the crimes of the royal assassin. There is nothing easier to conceive than the eagerness with which such tyrants as Constantine, and his son Constantins, would embrace so _convenient_ a religion as the one newly vamped. The Pagan priest, Sapator, was put to death for expressing horror at the crimes of the former, which were readily absolved by the Christian priests; and when the latter wanted to commit similar murders, he found a ready assistant in the Bishop of Nicomedia, a _holy father_ of the fourth century, who forged a fatal deed, which he affirmed to be the testament of the deceased emperor; in which his son Constantius was enjoined and conjured to murder his two uncles (one of whom was his father-in-law), Optatus, the husband of his aunt, and seven cousins german, one of whom was his brother-in-law. These were the first imperial patrons of Christianity! The good bishop no doubt justified Constantine in the bloody injunction laid in his forged will, by the example of David, who, with his last breath, enjoined his son Solomon to murder his faithful general, Joab, and Shimei, though he had sworn not to harm the latter; in like manner Constantius had pledged his solemn oath for the security of his kinsmen.