Christianity was destined to undergo a final ordeal before it should 88 ascend the throne of the Cæsars. The church must pass once more through the purifying flames of persecution before it was fit to be entrusted with the reins of empire. The long peace and temporal prosperity had fostered pride and luxury, and relaxed the morals of the Christian community. Schisms and feuds destroyed the unity of the faith, and the bishops had begun to aspire to temporal power, and to assert an unwarranted authority. “Prelates inveighed against prelates,” says Eusebius, “and people rose against people, assailing each other with words as with darts and spears.”[119] The blasts of adversity were necessary to winnow the spurious and false away, and to leave the tried and true behind. From the fatal slumber of religious apathy into which the church was falling it was to be rudely awakened. Its former afflictions sank into insignificance compared with this great tribulation, which was pre-eminently called _The_ Persecution by the historian of the times.[120] The close of the third century witnessed the strange spectacle of the government of the Roman world by a group of men who had climbed to the giddy height of power from the lowest stations in life. Diocletian, originally a slave, or at least the son of a slave, reduced the haughty aristocracy of Rome to a condition of oriental servility. Maximian, a Pannonian peasant, betrayed the savageness of his nature by his bloodthirsty cruelty. Galerius, an Illyrian herdsman, but exhibited more conspicuously upon the throne of empire the native barbarity of his character. Constantius was of nobler birth than any of his colleagues, and he alone adorned his lofty station by dignity, justice, and clemency. The world groaned under the oppression of its cruel masters. So exhausting were their exactions that none remained 89 to tax, says Lactantius,[121] but the beggars.