ideas of the Sufis and the Buddhists, and of other Oriental religionists, which gave the impulse to monastic life and led to the austerities of the Church in the second and third centuries, so much as the practical evils with which every one was conversant, and which were plainly antagonistic to the doctrine that the life is more than meat.  The triumph of the mind over the body excited an admiration scarcely less marked than the voluntary sacrifice of life to a sacred cause.  Asceticism, repulsive in many of its aspects, and even unnatural and inhuman, drew a cordon around the Christians, and separated them from the sensualities of ordinary life.  It was a reproof as well as a protest.  It attacked Epicureanism in its most vulnerable point.  “How hardly shall they who have riches enter into the kingdom of God?” Hence the voluntary poverty, the giving away of inherited wealth to the poor, the extreme simplicity of living, and even retirement from the habitations of men, which marked the more earnest of the new believers.  Hence celibacy, and avoidance of the society of women,—­all to resist most dangerous temptation.  Hence the vows of poverty and chastity which early entered monastic life,—­a life favorable to ascetic virtues.  These were indeed perverted.  Everything good is perverted in this world.  Self-expiations, flagellations, sheepskin cloaks, root dinners, repulsive austerities, followed.  But these grew out of the noble desire to keep unspotted from the world.  And unless this desire had been encouraged by the leaders of the Church, the Christian would soon have been contaminated with the vices of Paganism, especially such as were fashionable,—­as is deplorably the case in our modern times, when it is so difficult to draw the line between those who do not and those who do openly profess the Christian faith.  It is quite probable that Christianity would not have triumphed over Paganism, had not Christianity made so strong a protest against those vices and fashions which were peculiar to an Epicurean age and an Epicurean philosophy.

It was at this period, when Christianity was a great spiritual power, that Constantine arose.  He was born at Naissus, in Dacia, A.D. 274, his father being a soldier of fortune, and his mother the daughter of an innkeeper.  He was eighteen when his father, Constantius, was promoted by the Emperor Diocletian to the dignity of Caesar,—­a sort of lieutenant-emperor,—­and early distinguished himself in the Egyptian and Persian wars.  He was thirty-one when he joined his father in Britain, whom he succeeded, soon after, in the imperial dignity.  Like Theodosius, he was tall, and majestic in manners; gracious, affable, and accessible, like Julius; prudent, cautious, reticent, like Fabius; insensible to the allurements of pleasure, and incredibly active and bold, like Hannibal, Charlemagne, and Napoleon; a politic man, disposed to ally himself with the rising party.  The first few years of his reign, which