It was then that, for the first time, Christianity (or rather a something worse than paganism which usurped its name) took possession of the thrones of princes. The religion of the court, it became the fashionable religion. Aristocrats, military men, the leading professions, men of the world, became converts to it in a twinkling. We speak, of course, only of the _name_--not of the _thing_. It was the _name_ only that was established by Constantine: the _thing_ itself he knew and cared nothing about. The religion as taught by Jesus and his disciples is not a religion for courts and courtiers; it flourishes not in presence of emperors and prætorian guards. Constantine’s conversion was but a _coup d’état_, or political _ruse_, to destroy Christianity by itself; _alias_, to make its votaries (all true believers) ashamed of its very name, through seeing it professed by base hypocrites--its natural and irreconcilable enemies. Its immediate effect was to neutralise the force of Christianity as operating against the abuses of government and against social injustice. It became henceforward impossible to know who were Christians and who were not--at least, who were sincere and who were not; the false ones bearing the same name as the true ones, and, in proportion to their hypocrisy, more emphatic and ostentatious in their profession of faith than the true believers. As a matter of course, the rich, the ambitious, the low intriguer, the bustling man of the world, adhered publicly to the name or profession of Christian for the sake of the good things attached thereto in church and state. The honest, the simple-hearted, the oppressed many saw they were foully tricked, but were powerless to right themselves. Between the pagans, who still adhered to the old system, and their hypocritical betrayers in high places, their fate was a deplorable one. After all their struggles and sacrifices for Christianity, they had the mortification to find that, just at the moment they counted upon victory, they found discomfiture and shame; and that what 300 years of pagan torturings, dungeonings, and terrorism had failed to accomplish against their religion, was effected at once by an “organised hypocrisy” of _soi-disant_ Christians supposed to belong to their own church and party.