they picked up the sword and felt their grip sure upon its hilt, this
future and distant punishment materialized into a present and
persistent persecution of their opponents. Is not that suggestive?
Then, again, when in the course of human evolution, both Christianity
and Mohammedanism lost the secular support--the throne, the favor of
the courts, the imperial treasury--they fell back once more upon
future penalties as the sole menace against an unbelieving world. As
religion grows, secularly speaking, weaker, and is more completely
divorced from the temporal, even the future penalties, from being both
literal and frightful, pale into harmless figures of speech.

It was but a short time after the conversion of the Emperor
Constantine, that the following edict was published throughout the
provinces of the Roman Empire:

"O ye enemies of truth, authors and counsellors of death--we enact by this
law that none of you dare hereafter to meet at your conventicles...nor
keep any meetings either in public buildings or private houses. We
have commanded that all your places of meeting--your temples--be pulled
down or confiscated to the Catholic Church."

The man who affixed his signature to this edict was a monarch, that is
to say, a man who had the power to do as he liked. The man and
monarch, then, who affixed his imperial signature to this _first_
document of persecution in Europe--the first, because, as Renan has
beautifully remarked, "We may search in vain the whole Roman law
before Constantine for a single passage against freedom of thought,
and the history of the imperial government furnishes no instance of a
prosecution for entertaining an abstract doctrine,"--this is glory
enough for the civilization 'which we call _Pagan_ and which was