ce more
united under one head.

After his victory over Licinius, Constantine declared himself a
Christian, which he had not done before; and he used to attend the
services of the Church very regularly, and to stand all the time that
the bishops were preaching, however long their sermons might be. He used
even himself to write a kind of discourses something like sermons, and
to read them aloud in the palace to all his court; but he really knew
very little of Christian doctrine, although he was very fond of taking
part in disputes about it. And, although he professed to be a Christian,
he had not yet been made a member of Christ by baptism; for, in those
days, people had so high a notion of the grace of baptism, that many of
them put off their baptism until they supposed that they were on their
death-bed, for fear lest they should sin after being baptized, and so
should lose the benefit of the sacrament. This was of course wrong; for
it was a sad mistake to think that they might go on in sin so long as
they were not baptized. God, we know, might have cut them off at any
moment in the midst of all their sins; and even if they were spared,
there was a great danger that, when they came to beg for baptism at
last, they might not have that true spirit of repentance and faith
without which they could not be fit to receive the grace of the
sacrament. And therefore the teachers of the Church used to warn people
against putting off their baptism out of a love for sin; and when any
one had received _clinical_ baptism, as it was called (that is to say,
_baptism on a sick-bed_), if he afterwards got well again, he was
thought but little of in the Church.

But to come back to Constantine. He had many other faults besides his
unwillingness to take on himself the duties of a baptized Christian;
and, although we are bound to thank God for having turned his heart to
favour the Church, we must not be blind to the emperor's faults. Yet,
with all these faults, he really believed the Gospel, and meant to do
what he could for the truth.

It took a long time to put down heathenism; for it would not have been
safe or wise to force people to become Christians before they had come
to see the falsehood of their old religion. Constantine, therefore, only
made laws against some of its worst practices, and forbade any
sacrifices to be offered in the name of the empire; but he did not
hinder the heathens from sacrificing on their own account if they