d praises also his later edicts against various heretics
and schismatics, but without mentioning the Arians. In his later years
he seems, indeed, to have issued a general prohibition of idolatrous
sacrifice; Eusebius speaks of it, and his sons in 341 refer to an edict
to that effect; but the repetition of it by his successors proves that,
if issued, it was not carried into general execution under his reign.

With this shrewd, cautious, and moderate policy of Constantine, which
contrasts well with the violent fanaticism of his sons, accords the
postponement of his own baptism to his last sickness. For this he had
the further motives of a superstitious desire, which he himself
expresses, to be baptized in the Jordan, whose waters had been
sanctified by the Saviour's baptism, and no doubt also a fear that he
might by relapse forfeit the sacramental remission of sins. He wished to
secure all the benefit of baptism as a complete expiation of past sins,
with as little risk as possible, and thus to make the best of both
worlds. Deathbed baptisms then were to half Christians of that age what
deathbed conversions and deathbed communions are now. But he presumed to
preach the gospel, he called himself the bishop of bishops, he convened
the first general council, and made Christianity the religion of the
empire, long before his baptism! Strange as this inconsistency appears
to us, what shall we think of the court bishops who, from false
prudence, relaxed in his favor the otherwise strict discipline of the
church, and admitted him, at least tacitly, to the enjoyment of nearly
all the privileges of believers, before he had taken upon himself even a
single obligation of a catechumen?

When, after a life of almost uninterrupted health, he felt the approach
of death, he was received into the number of catechumens by laying on of
hands, and then formally admitted by baptism into the full communion of
the church in the year 337, the sixty-fifth year of his age, by the
Arian (or properly Semi-Arian) bishop Eusebius of Nicomedia, whom he had
shortly before recalled from exile together with Arius! His dying
testimony then was, as to form, in favor of heretical rather than
orthodox Christianity, but merely from accident, not from intention. He
meant the Christian as against the heathen religion, and whatever of
Arianism may have polluted his baptism, was for the Greek Church fully
neutralized by the orthodox canonization. After the solemn ce