where we
are now to view it, we may collect from indisputable authority. I stated
in the former section, that a Christian soldier was punished for
refusing to wear a garland, like the rest of his comrades, on a public
occasion. This man, it appears, had been converted in the army, and
objected to the ceremony on that account. Now Tertullian tells us, that
this soldier was blamed for his unseasonable zeal, as it was called, by
some of the Christians at that time, though all Christians before
considered the wearing of such a garland as unlawful and profane. In
this century there is no question but the Christian discipline began to
relax. To the long peace the church enjoyed from the death of Antoninus
to the tenth year of Severus, is to be ascribed the corruption that
ensued. This corruption we find to have spread rapidly; for the same
Tertullian was enabled to furnish us with the extraordinary instance of
manufacturers of idols being admitted into the ecclesiastical order.
Many corruptions are also noticed in this century by other writers.
Cyprian complained of them, as they existed in the middle, and Eusebius,
as they existed at the end of it, and both attributed it to the peace,
or to the ease and plenty, which the Christians had enjoyed. The latter
gives us a melancholy account of their change. They had begun to live in
fine houses, and to indulge in luxuries. But, above all, they had begun
to be envious, and quarrelsome, and to dissemble, and to cheat, and to
falsify their word, so that they lost the character, which Pliny, an
adversary to their religion, had been obliged to give of them, and which
they had retained for more than a century, as appears by their own
writers.

That there were Christian soldiers in this more corrupt century of the
church, it is impossible to deny. For such frequent mention is made of
them in the histories, which relate to this period, that we cannot
refuse our assent to one or other of the propositions, either that there
were men in the armies, who called themselves Christians, or that there
were men in them, who had that name given them by others. That they were
Christians, however, is another question. They were probably such
Christians, as Dion mentioned to have been among the life-guards of
Dioclesian and Maximian, and of Constantius and Maximus, of whom
Maximilian observed, "These men may know what it is expedient for them
to do, but I am a Christian, and therefore I cannot fight."