military ambition, is repugnant to the
genius of the gospel and to sound Christian feeling, unless we stretch
the theory of divine accommodation to the spirit of the age and the
passions and interests of individuals beyond the ordinary limits. We
should suppose, moreover, that Christ, if he had really appeared to
Constantine either in person (according to Eusebius) or through angels
(as Rufinus and Sozomen modify it), would have exhorted him to repent
and be baptized rather than to construct a military ensign for a bloody
battle. In no case can we ascribe to this occurrence, with Eusebius,
Theodoret, and older writers, the character of a sudden and genuine
conversion, as to Paul's vision of Christ on the way to Damascus; for,
on the one hand, Constantine was never hostile to Christianity, but most
probably friendly to it from his early youth, according to the example
of his father, and, on the other, he put off his baptism quite five and
twenty years, almost to the hour of his death.

The opposite hypothesis of a mere military stratagem or intentional
fraud is still more objectionable, and would compel us either to impute
to the first Christian emperor, at a venerable age, the double crime of
falsehood and perjury, or, if Eusebius invented the story, to deny to
the 'father of church history' all claim to credibility and common
respectability. Besides, it should be remembered that the older
testimony of Lactantius, or whoever was the author of the work on the
Deaths of Persecutors, is quite independent of that of Eusebius, and
derives additional force from the vague heathen rumors of the time.
Finally the _Hoc vince_, which has passed into proverbial significance
as a most appropriate motto of the invincible religion of the cross, is
too good to be traced to sheer falsehood. Some actual fact, therefore,
must be supposed to underlie the tradition, and the question only is
this, whether it was an external, viable phenomenon or an internal
experience.

The hypothesis of a natural formation of the clouds, which Constantine
by an optical illusion mistook for a supernatural sign of the cross,
besides smacking of the exploded rationalistic explanation of the New
Testament miracles, and deriving an important event from a mere
accident, leaves the figure of Christ and the Greek or Latin
inscription, '_By this sign thou shalt conquer!_' altogether
unexplained.

We are shut up, therefore, to the theory of a dream or vision, and