"Moreover we thought that if there can be found extant any work or book
compiled by Arius the same should be burned to ashes, so that not only
his damnable doctrine may thereby be wholly rooted out, but also that
no relic thereof may remain unto posterity. This we also straightway
command and charge, that if any man be found to hide or conceal any
book made by Arius, and not immediately bring forth such book, and
deliver it up to be burned, that the said offender for so doing shall
die the death. For as soon as he is taken our pleasure is that his head
shall be stricken off from his shoulders." Rather a blood-thirsty,
edict to be issued by the "puissant, the mighty and noble Emperor," and
a very inconsistent one, considering that he soon afterwards readopted
the Unitarian faith and restored the banished bishops to their
respective sees; but, regardless of his action, the Church of Rome
sustained the Trinitarian creed and enforced the dogma of the supreme
divinity of Christ.

Thus we see that the history of Christianity, in the first half of the
fourth century, cannot be written without incorporating considerable
from the life of Constantine, whose ensanguined record before his
pretended conversion marks him as the most brutal tyrant that ever
disgraced the imperial purple; but the appalling crimes he perpetrated
afterwards, among which were the scalding his inoffending wife to death
in a bath of boiling water, and the murdering, without cause, of six
members of his family, one of which was his own son, justify what a
learned writer said of him, that "The most unfortunate event that ever
befell the human race was the adoption of Christianity by the
crimson-handed cut-throat in the possession of unlimited power," and
yet Constantine was canonized by the Eastern church.

During the first three centuries, when Christianity was but a weak