readily granting the desired absolution, he added another victim to his
butcher bill by ordering the death of the honest priest who had refused
to grant him absolution. The Christian sect having become a powerful
and dangerous faction, Constantine conceived the idea of strengthening
his usurped and precarious position by attaching it to his interest,
and to that end he professed himself a convert to its tenets, and,
taking the Church of Rome under his especial patronage, elevated her
Bishop to the rank of a prince of the Empire and gave him one of his
palaces for a residence.

The Christian hierarchy, knowing that it would be a potent means of
confirming the faith of the laity in the Gospel story as a literal
history to have a tomb of the Saviour to which pilgrimages could be
made, and appealing to Constantine to provide one, he sent his mother,
Helena, to Judea to find the place and, of course, discovering what she
went to look for, he had erected, under her supervision, over the
designated spot, that splendid edifice which, known as the church of
the Holy Sepulchre, remains to this day. Helena, good at finding lost
things, also claimed to have discovered the veritable cross upon which
the Saviour had been crucified; and her son, worthy of such a mother,
claimed, as recorded by Eusebius, that he had seen with his own eyes
the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, bearing
the inscription: "In Hoc Signo Vinces," signifying "Under this sign,
conquer." Those were times of remarkable and supernatural occurrences.

At the time Constantine became the patron of Christianity the bishops
and presbyters of the several churches, seemingly ignorant of the
teachings of the Esoteric philosophy relative to the origin of the
Trinity, were divided into two factions in discussing the relation
between the Father and the Son. One party, headed by Athanasius, a