Eusebius tells of the increasing vices, schisms, quarrelings of the bishops, of their greed for money and preeminence in the last half of the third century. In speaking of the bishops and pastors who had the administration of church government in the year 260, he says: “But some that appeared to be our pastors, deserting the law of piety, were inflamed against each other with mutual strifes, only accumulating quarrels and threats, rivalship, hostility and hatred to each other, only anxious to assert the government as a kind of sovereignty for themselves.” Then he adds, “As Jeremiah says, ‘The Lord in his anger darkened the daughter of Sion [the church or moon], and hurled from heaven to earth the glory of Israel.’ ” By this we learn that Eusebius would place the darkening of the church, or the beginning of the dark noonday, near the year 260 A.D. Quotations could be transcribed from Coleman, Marsh, Waddington and others, in which they all place the close of the morning light and the rise of the apostasy or dark noonday between the years 260 and 280 A.D. To our knowledge, Joseph Milner is the only non-contemporary historian that fixes the date to any definite time. He says, “I know it is common for authors to represent the great declension of Christianity to have taken place only after its external establishment under Constantine. But the evidence of history has compelled me to dissent from this view of things. In fact we have seen that for a whole generation previous to the persecution, few marks of superior piety appeared. Scarce a luminary of godliness existed, and it is not common in any age for a great work of the Spirit of God to be exhibited but under the conduct of some remarkable saint, pastor and reformers. This whole period as well as the whole scene of the persecution is very barren of such characters. Not but that many precious children of God suffered in much patience and charity. But those who suffered with very much of a different spirit, found no pastor to discountenance their self-will and false zeal: a sure sign that the true spirit of martyrdom was less pure than it had formerly been. Moreover the prevalence of superstition on the one hand, and the decay of evangelical knowledge on the other, are equally apparent. Christ crucified, justification purely by faith, and the effectual influences of the Holy Ghost, ... were ideas at least very faintly impressed at that day on Christian minds. It is vain to expect Christian faith to abound without Christian doctrine. Moral and philosophical and monastical instructions will not effect for men what is expected from evangelical doctrine. And if the faith of Christ was so much declined (and its decayed state ought to be dated from about the year 270) we need not wonder that such scenes as Eusebius hints at without any circumstantial detail took place in the Christian world.”—_Century IV_, p. 31.