Page:Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1827) Vol 2.djvu/433

 OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE. 415 The enthusiasm which inspired the troops, and per- C H A P. haps the emperor himself, had sharpened their swords while it satisfied their conscience. They marched to Expectation and belief a miracle. battle with the full assurance, that the same God who ^'"1 belief of had formerly opened a passage to the Israelites throuoh the waters of Jordan, and had thrown down the walls of Jericho at the sound of the trumpets of Joshua, would display his visible majesty and power in the victory of Constantine. The evidence of ecclesiastical history is prepared to affirm, that their expectations were justified by the conspicuous miracle to which the conversion of the first christian emperor has been al- most unanimously ascribed. The real or imaginary cause of so important an event deserves and demands the attention of posterity ; and I shall endeavour to form a just estimate of the famous vision of Constan- tine, by a distinct consideration of the standard, the dream, and the celestial sign; by separating the his- torical, the natural, and the marvellous parts of this extraordinary story, which, in the composition of a specious argument, have been artfully confounded in one splendid and brittle mass. I. An instrument of the tortures which were in-The'laba- flicted only on slaves and strangers, became an object s"^dard of of horror in the eyes of a Roman citizen; and the the cross. ideas of guilt, of pain, and of ignominy, were closely united with the idea of the cross ^ The piety, rather than the humanity of Constantine, soon abolished in his dominions the punishment which the Saviour of sort of religious crusade. At the invitation of the tyrant, some christian officers had resumed their zones ; or, in other words, had returned to the military service. Their conduct was afterwards censured by the twelfth canon of the council of Xice ; if this particular application may be received, instead of the loose and general sense of the Greek interpreters, Balsamon, Zonaras, and Alexis Aristenus. See Beveridge, Pandect. Eccles. Graac. torn. i. p. 72. torn. ii. p. 78. Annotation. f Nomen ipsum crnch absit non modo a corpore civium Romanorum, sed etiam a cogitatione, oculis, auribus. Cicero pro Rabirio, c. 5. The christian writers, Justin, Minucius Felix, Tertulhan, Jerome, and INIaximus of Turin, have investigated with tolerable success the figure or likeness of a cross in almost every object of nature or art ; in the intersection of the me- ridian and equator, the human face, a bird flying, a man swimming, a mast and yard, a plough, a staudard, etc. etc. etc. See Lipsiusde Cruce, l.i. c. 9.