Constantine by J. H. Waggoner

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, Cal. · Jul 29, 1875

Constantine.

By J. H. Waggoner

It appears, not from a single statement of a single historian, but from the oft-repeated statements of many historians, that Eusebius was so carried away by the supposed benefit that Constantine was conferring on Christianity, and the personal favors bestowed on himself by the emperor, and so far lost sight of the purity of the gospel and the strictness of Christian principles, as to greatly injure his own reputation as a historian. With Constantine's crude or confused notions of Christianity, with his commingling of pagan and Christian rites, as it is well agreed that he did, most of his public career, if not to the very last year of his life, with his policy of making everything subserve his own interests, we cannot be surprised that he both practiced and advised deception when it favored his plans. Theodoret thus speaks of his address to the bishops of the council of Nice :—

"He said that the crimes of priests ought not to be made known to the multitude, lest they become an occasion of offence or of sin. He said also that if he had detected a bishop in the very act of committing adultery he would have thrown his imperial robe over the unlawful deed, lest any should witness the scene and be thereby injured."—Theodoret, p. 46.

When we see that the influence of this advice has not been lost upon the church even unto this day; when we consider how many in this age of light, plead against faithfully exposing the sins of professed ministers of Christ, lest the gospel faith should thereby receive injury, we are not surprised that the words of the emperor, who was regarded almost as an oracle by the bishops, should have been received as wise and prudent, and acted upon. Eusebius was as likely as any to follow in the wake of his imperial master. And we are not left in this matter to a supposition as the following shows :—

"In describing the sufferings of the Christians during the last persecution, Eusebius admits that it does not agree with our plan to relate their dissensions and wickedness before the persecution on which account we have determined to relate nothing more concerning them than may serve to justify the Divine Judgment. We have, therefore, not been induced to make mention either of those who were tempted in the persecution, or of those who made utter shipwreck of their salvation, and were sunk of their own accord in the the depths of the storm; but shall only add those things to our General History which may in the first place be profitable to ourselves, and afterwards to posterity! And in another passage he asserts that the events most suitable to a history of martyrs, are those which redound to their honor." Waddington, Eccl. His., p. 90.

There are few writers who seem to have given more easy credence to the statements of Eusebius than Gericke, yet he is constrained to speak of him as follows :—

"It is to be regretted that this oftentimes wavering and weak, yet great, emperor—who, under the impulse of passion, was guilty even of the murder of his son Crispus and of his own wife Fausta—could not have had the plain warnings, and evangelical instructions, of a bolder and less dazzled spiritual guide than was the bishop Eusebius."—Page 243.

Neander says :—

"We should remark that Eusebius was strongly inclined to turn everything to the advantage of his hero."—Vol. 2, p. 6.

Waddington, however, does not need the aid of other historians to justify the statement we first quoted. In the following he gives, and that most forcibly, further reasons why he cannot rely fully on the words of Eusebius :—

"But that delinquency of Eusebius which we have just mentioned is confined to the suppression of truth—it does not proceed to the direct assertion of falsehood—we shall now notice a still more serious suspicion to which he has rendered himself liable. The thirty-first chapter of the twelfth book of his Evangelical Preparation bears for its title this scandalous proposition—'How it may be lawful and fitting to use falsehood as a medicine, for the advantage of those who require such a method'! We have already deplored with sorrow and indignation, the fatal moment when fraud and falsehood were first admitted into the service of religion. Philosophy, in the open array of her avowed hostility, was not so dangerous as when she lent to her undisciplined adversaries her own poisoned weapons, and placed them in unskillful hands, as implements of self-destruction. It was disgraceful to the less enlightened fathers of the second and third centuries, that even in the midst of trial and tribulation, they borrowed a momentary succor from the profession of falsehood—but the same expedient was still more shameful to Eusebius, who flourished during the prosperity of the church, whose age and more extensive learning left him no excuse in ignorance or inexperience, and whose great name and unquestionable piety gave sanction and authority to all his opinions. There can be no doubt, then, that the publication of that detestable principle in any one of his writings, however modified and limited by his explanation, must, to a certain extent, disturb our confidence in the rest—the mind which does not profess to be constantly guided by truth possesses no claim to our implicit submission."—Church History, p. 91.

Mosheim more than casts a doubt upon the veracity of Eusebius or his reliability, at the least, in the following language :—

"These very edicts, which evince his good will for the Christians and his reverence for Christ, at the same time prove that all the things stated by Eusebius could not be true; and they show Constantine was not, at that time, a Christian, except in the lowest sense. For while he believed Christ to be a God, he did not believe him to be the supreme God, who created all things; nor did he consider the Christian religion to be the only way of attaining salvation."—His. Com., p. 467.

Keightley, speaking of the murder of Constantine's son—for no other name can be given to the crime—thus presents the evidence against the 'courtly bishop' :—

"When a biographer passes in silence over any important action of his hero, we may be certain that a minute and exact inquiry, and a sifting of all the circumstances, has convinced him that it is incapable of bearing exposure to the light, and that no ingenuity can avail to extenuate, much less excuse it. On this principle we hold the profound silence of Eusebius on this mysterious transaction to be conclusive of the guilt of Constantine and the innocence of Crispus; and, at the same time, destructive of that prelate's claim to truth and integrity as an historian."—History of Rome, p. 346.

No one can reasonably complain of the tenor of this language. No one can deny that it is fully justified by the circumstances. On the part of Eusebius there is more than the suppression of a well-known and important fact; he exalted the character of Constantine even as if the crushing fact did not exist. It must appeal to every one that if he had considered that that action could be justified he would have noticed it with all the extenuating circumstances he could command. But, as Keightley well says, it was evidently beyond his power to justify or extenuate. Who, then, can justify the course of Eusebius in holding up Constantine as a man of pure life and pure motives, in the face of such facts?

Nor was it left to later ages to discover this want of integrity in Eusebius. One born in his own century has left on record the following estimate of his reliability :—

"In writing the life of Constantine this author has very slightly treated of the Arian controversy, being evidently more intent on a highly wrought eulogium of the emperor, than an accurate statement of facts."—Socrates' Eccl. History, p. 1.

Thus we think it is made plain beyond question that Constantine was not, in consideration of either his laws or his actions, worthy of the name of Christian. And that Eusebius, his favorite bishop and most servile flatterer, was so intent on exalting Constantine as a Christian Emperor that he both suppressed and misrepresented facts to such an extent as to render his testimony unreliable in many respects.

The questions will naturally arise in many minds, Why is it that Eusebius is regarded so highly as a historian while the evidence is so abundant that he was so biassed and blinded that he greatly perverted the facts of history? And why is it that Constantine, even in this day is held up as a Christian, and extolled as a Christian Emperor and the benefactor of the church, while historians are so well agreed that his religion was a mixture of Christianity and paganism, that his whole life was unworthy of a Christian and even of a humane pagan, and that his influence over the church was evil, and disastrous to her as regards piety and purity of both faith and life? The reader is requested to weigh these questions, and consider what reasonable solution may be offered to this apparent mystery. We have no hesitation in giving it as our opinion that partisan prejudice has had much to do with this perversion of history, and that men have, perhaps, not always conscious of the motive or of the evil resulting, exalted unworthy means for the purpose of maintaining what they really considered worthy ends.

We come now to the consideration of Constantine's famous Sunday edict. While many will, no doubt, be surprised at the evidence of history on this subject, all will be able to perceive the justness of the remark in the preceding paragraph.

In the year 321, March 7, Constantine issued the following :—

"Let all the judges and town people, and the occupation of all trades, rest on the venerable day of the sun; but let those who are situated in the country, freely and at full liberty attend to the business of agriculture; because it often happens that no other day is so fit for sowing corn and planting vines; lest the critical moment being let slip, men should lose the commodities granted by Heaven."

This is a matter of great historical interest, and the place which it has been made to occupy in theology makes it the most interesting event in the life of Constantine. History points with unmistakable directness to this decree as the first law for resting from labor on Sunday. And because of the position given to Sunday for a few centuries past it is important to understand the real motive which actuated the emperor in giving this decree. From a careful observation of the subject, we are constrained to believe that the effort to make Constantine appear as a "Christian emperor" has been made in reference to this Sunday law, to give it the character of a Christian institution. It is indeed true that if Constantine had been an earnest or sincere Christian at the time of his issuing this decree it would not prove it to be a Christian institution. To prove that we should require something back of his authority, as it cannot be disputed that an emperor in the fourth century, however sincere in his belief in Christianity, could not bring into existence a Christian institution. For such an institution we must have the direct evidence of Scripture.

First, then, we must notice the fact that this was the first public authority for Sunday keeping. Dr. Heylyn, of England, who wrote extensively on this question, said :—

"Tertullian tells us that they did devote the Sunday partly unto mirth and recreation, not to devotion altogether; when in a hundred years after Tertullian's time there was no law nor Constitution to restrain men from laboring on this day in the Christian church." Hist. of the Sabbath, part 2, chap. 8, §13.

Tertullian died 216; a hundred years brings us to 316, only five years before Constantine's law. Thus does Heylyn point to that as the first law to restrain men from laboring on Sunday.

Alexander Campbell, speaking before a graduating class in Bethany College in 1848, said:—

"Was the first day set apart by public authority in the apostolic age? No. By whom was it set apart, and when? By Constantine, who lived about the beginning of the fourth century."—Copied from Proclamation and Reformer, Cincinnati.

Morer wrote thus of the first day :—

"And being taken up and made a day for religious exercises, yet for three hundred years there was no law to bind them to it, and for want of such a law, the day was not wholly kept in abstaining from common business; nor did they any longer rest from their ordinary affairs (such was the necessity of those times) than during the divine service."—Dialogues on the Lord's Day, p. 233.

Here, again, three hundred years

pass away before there was any law for resting on Sunday. Although the churches were accustomed to hold divine service on that day, they were accustomed to do the same on the sixth day; on the one, in honor of the crucifixion; on the other, in honor of the resurrection. They did not, however, claim any Scriptural authority for such customs, nor did they abstain from secular labor on either day.

Sir Wm. Domville, who closely and critically examined this subject, wrote as follows :—

"Centuries of the Christian era passed away before the Sunday was observed by the Christian church as a Sabbath. History does not furnish us with a single proof or indication that it was at any time so observed previous to the Sabbatical edict of Constantine in A. D. 321." Exam. of the Six Texts, p. 291.

J. W. Morton, formerly missionary of the Reformed Presbyterian church, in his address to the synod, said :—

"The first day of the week was not observed by any of the children of men, as a Sabbath, for three hundred years after the birth of Christ. Do you ask for proof? I refer you to Theodore de Beza, who plainly says so. If you are not satisfied with the witness, will you have the goodness to prove the affirmative of the proposition."—Vindication of True Sabbath, p. 34.

J. H. WAGGONER.

(To be Continued.)