long and wintry a night, begin to behold the genial light of heaven.
They rebuild the churches, which had been levelled to the ground;
they found, erect, and finish churches to the holy martyrs, and
everywhere show their ensigns as token of their victory; festivals
are celebrated and sacraments received with clean hearts and lips,
and all the church's sons rejoice as it were in the fostering
bosom of a mother. For this holy union remained between Christ
their head and the members of his church, until the Arian treason,
fatal as a serpent, and vomiting its poison from beyond the sea,
caused deadly dissension between brothers inhabiting the same house,
and thus, as if a road were made across the sea, like wild beasts
of all descriptions, and darting the poison of every heresy from
their jaws, they inflicted dreadful wounds upon their country,
which is ever desirous to hear something new, and remains constant
long to nothing.

13. At length also, new races of tyrants sprang up, in terrific
numbers, and the island, still bearing its Roman name, but casting
off her institutes and laws, sent forth among the Gauls that bitter
scion of her own planting Maximus, with a great number of followers,
and the ensigns of royalty, which he bore without decency and
without lawful right, but in a tyrannical manner, and amid the
disturbances of the seditious soldiery. He, by cunning arts rather
than by valour, attaching to his rule, by perjury and falsehood,
all the neighbouring towns and provinces, against the Roman state,
extended one of his wings to Spain, the other to Italy, fixed
the seat of his unholy government at Treves, and so furiously
pushed his rebellion against his lawful emperors that he drove
one of them out of Rome, and caused the other to terminate his
most holy life. Trusting to these successful attempts, he not