that the Pagan priests, when called upon by one who was Pontifex
Maximus and therefore their spiritual superior as well as the supreme
emperor, would not have scrupled to invent some purifying rite--if they
had none such--warranted to blot out the stain of every crime and
thoroughly appease offended heaven.

However this may have been, these terrible crimes of Constantine, all
committed many years after his alleged conversion to our faith, show
how badly advised we are to so needlessly go out of our way to claim as
a Christian one who refused to enter the Christian Church till he was
dying and possibly no longer master of himself.

It is said that this refusal of his to be baptised till he was weak and
dying and surrounded by Church officials who would perhaps have spread
the report that he had been baptised even if they had not then at last
been able to induce him to take the decisive step, was due, not to want
of belief, but to excess of belief; Constantine's idea being that the
longer he put off the rite in question, the more crimes would it wash
out. Or, in other words, that delay would enable him to sin with
impunity a little longer.

This may possibly have been the case, but it should at the same time be
borne in mind that whether Constantine called him Apollo or Christ, it
seems probable that it was the Sun-God to whom he referred. For
everything tends to show that this astute emperor, who so naturally
wished to establish and mould a religion which all his subjects of
whatever race or nationality might be reasonably expected to become in
time willing to accept, acted during his reign as supreme ruler of the
Roman World, if not from first to last, as if the Christ were but
another conception of the Sun-God he was brought up to worship as