It was when he was marching against Maxentius that his conversion to
Christianity took place, A.D. 312, when he was thirty-eight, in the
sixth year of his reign. Up to this period he was a zealous Pagan, and
made magnificent offerings to the gods of his ancestors, and erected
splendid temples, especially in honor of Apollo. The turn of his mind
was religious, or, as we are taught by modern science to say,
superstitious. He believed in omens, dreams, visions, and supernatural
influences.

Now it was in a very critical period of his campaign against his Pagan
rival, on the eve of an important battle, as he was approaching Rome for
the first time, filled with awe of its greatness and its recollections,
that he saw--or fancied he saw--a little after noon, just above the sun
which he worshipped, a bright Cross, with this inscription, [Greek: En
touto nika]--"In this conquer;" and in the following night, when sleep
had overtaken him, he dreamed that Christ appeared to him, and enjoined
him to make a banner in the shape of the celestial sign which he had
seen. Such is the legend, unhesitatingly received for centuries, yet
which modern critics are not disposed to accept as a miracle, although
attested by Eusebius, and confirmed by the emperor himself on oath.
Whether some supernatural sign really appeared or not, or whether some
natural phenomenon appeared in the heavens in the form of an illuminated
Cross, it is not worth while to discuss. We know this, however, that if
the greatest religious revolution of antiquity was worthy to be
announced by special signs and wonders, it was when a Roman emperor of
extraordinary force of character declared his intention to acknowledge
and serve the God of the persecuted Christians. The miracle rests on the
authority of a single bishop, as sacredly attested by the emperor, in
whom he saw no fault; but the fact of the conversion remains as one of
the most signal triumphs of Christianity, and the conversion itself was