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Updated: May 16, 2025
Dionysius of Milan, Eusebius of Vercellæ, and Lucifer of Calaris in Sardinia were the only bishops who had to be exiled. The appearance of Lucifer is enough to show that the contest had entered on a new stage. The lawless tyranny of Constantius had roused an aggressive fanaticism which went far beyond the claim of independence for the church.
In the full confidence that the approaching death of Constantius would leave him sole master of the Roman world, we are assured that he had arranged in his mind a long succession of future princes, and that he meditated his own retreat from public life, after he should have accomplished a glorious reign of about twenty years.
What Constantine's new creed would have been may be told from the fact that the Consubstantialists had gone out of power, and from what his son Constantius soon after did at the Council of Ariminium. So far, therefore, from the Council of Nicea ending the controversies afflicting religion, they continued with increasing fury.
The revolutions of the court multiplied the number of pretenders; and the same city was often disputed, under the reign of Constantius, by two, or three, or even four, bishops, who exercised their spiritual jurisdiction over their respective followers, and alternately lost and regained the temporal possessions of the church.
When the Emperor Constantius considered that the resistance of the Alexandrians had been sufficiently broken, he addressed them in a conciliatory letter. Now that the impostor had been driven out, he said, he was about to send them a Patriarch above praise.
The rise of a civil war in the West, and the departure of Constantius for Europe with the flower of his troops early in the year no doubt encouraged the Persian monarch to make one more effort against the place which had twice repulsed him with ignominy.
Nor can we find in him or, indeed, in the whole history of the churches founded by him anything of that bitter zeal and fanaticism which, nearly two centuries nearer to apostolic times, marred the work of the Councils under Constantius; the fierce animosity between Christian and Christian which marked the Arian controversy.
Disguising the anguish of his soul under the semblance of contempt, Constantius professed his intention of returning into Europe, and of giving chase to Julian; for he never spoke of his military expedition in any other light than that of a hunting party.
In the beginning of the fourth century the Roman Empire had four sovereigns, of whom two were superior to the others and bore the title of Augustus, namely, Diocletian and Maximianus Herculius; the two inferior sovereigns, who bore the title of Cæsars, were Constantius Chlorus and Galerius Maximianus. Under these four emperors the state of the Church was peaceful and happy.
Both Eusebius, writing about 320, and Sozomen, about 443, tell of an experiment made in the palace by Constantine's father Constantius, when he governed Gaul and Britain, which shews the spread of the gospel and the high places it had by that time reached.
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