their crown through private enmity or local tumults, when any one of the thousand motives which awaken ill-will was sufficient to cause an appeal to that great and unchanged enemy, the Law of Rome, which proscribed them. To Constantine belongs the glory of having removed this enemy. He made the profession of Christianity no longer a crime. He accomplished that which Justin and Tertullian and every Christian apologist had asked for in vain, that every Christian in the Roman empire might profess and practise the Christian Faith without suffering punishment for it. CHAPTER XIII. THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH AND THE GREEK PHILOSOPHY. PART I. _Socrates._ It is, then, necessary to wait until we learn how we ought to be disposed towards gods and men. _Alcibiades._ But when, Socrates, will that time arrive? and who shall teach us it? For it seems to me that I should with the greatest pleasure see that man. _Socrates._ It is he who cares for thee.(320) _Second Alcib._ § 22. In the three preceding chapters we have witnessed a great spectacle, a spectacle in all history unique and without a rival, the encounter, that is, with the forces of the great world-empire of a voluntary society which bears in its bosom and propagates a body of truth, and this encounter carried on without respite during ten generations of men. The elements of this conflict are, on the one side, power, throned in civilisation, and defended by that sword before which nothing hitherto had stood; on the other, a belief testified by suffering and patience, but which moreover appears only as the possession of a society which is itself dropped as a seed into the earth’s bosom and silently fills its expanse. Attention must now be called to another aspect of the same encounter. Rome, as we have said, preëminently wielded power; not the power of her legions only, immense as that was, but the power of her laws, and the power of that many-sided and as it seemed triumphant all-embracing civilisation, of which she was the golden head. The mind however, the thought of the world which she ruled, belonged to the great Hellenic race: and it remains to consider what contest this mind waged with the truth which the Christian Church sustained and suffered for. The sword hews away limbs; the fire destroys bodies; and the martyrs offered freely their limbs and their bodies to sword and flame. But the martyrs were inspired with a mind; they carried Christ in them; and a mind too was opposed to theirs; the mind which animated that ancient civilisation; the mind which had erected such shrines as Diana of Ephesus and the Parthenon at Athens; the mind which dictated the laws of Solon and Lycurgus; the mind which taught in the Academus, the Lyceum, the Portico, and the Garden; the mind which built Alexandria for the world’s emporium and university, and raised Antioch to be the gorgeous throne of eastern magnificence. We have to consider how