set his foot on the bare pavement." ' The Christianity of the Byzantine court lived in the atmos- phere of intrigue, dissimulation, and flattery. Even the court divines and bishops could hardly escape the contamination, though their high office, with its sacred functions, was certainly a protecting wall around them. One of these bishops con- gratulated Constantine, at the celebration of the third decen- nium of his reign (the tricennalia), that he had been aj)pointed by God ruler over all in this world, and would reign with the Son of God in the other ! This blasphemous flattery was too much even for the vain emperor, and he exhorted the bishop rather to pray God that he might be worthy to be one of his servants in this world and the next.'' Even the church historian and bishop Eusebius, who elsewhere knew well enough how to value the higher blessings, and lamented the indescribable hypocrisy of the sham Christianity around the emperor,' suf- fered himself to be so far blincled by the splendor of the im- perial favor, as to see in a banquet, which Constantine gave in his palace to the bishops at the close of the council of Nice, in honor of his twenty years' reign (the vicennalia), an emblem of the glorious reign of Christ upon the earth ! * * Milman : Hist, of Ancient Christianity, p. iiO (Am. ed.). Comp. the sketch of the court of Arcadius, which Montfaucon, in a treatise in the last volume of his Opera Chrys., and Muller : De gcnio, moribus, et luxu ajvi Theodosiani, Copenh. 1Y98, have drawn, chiefly from the works' of Chrysostom. - Euseb. Vit. Const, iv. 48. ' V. Const, iv. 54. ' V. Const, iii. 15, where Eusebius, at the close of this imperio-episcopal banquet, "which transcended all description," says : Xpicrruv PacriKeias tSo^iv &v ns (pavra- ffiovcr^ai elK6va, vvap t' dvai dW' ovx Srap rh -yivS/Mvov. § 25. INTRUSION OF POLITICS INTO RELIGION. 131 And these were bishops, of whom many still bore in their body the marks of the Diocletian persecution. So rapidly had changed the spirit of the age. While, on the other hand, the well-known firmness of Ambrose with Theodosius, and the life of Chrysostom, afford deliglitful proof that tliere were not wanting, even in this age, bishops of Christian earnestness and courage to rebuke the sins of crowned heads. § 25. Intni^ion of Politics into Religion. "With the union of the church and the state begins the long and tedious history of their collisions and their mutual strug- gles for the mastery : the state seeking to subject the church to the empire, the church to subject the state to the hierarchy, and both very often transgressing the limits prescribed to their power in that word of the Lord : " Render unto Csesar the thino-s which are Csesar's, and unto God the things that are God's." From the time of Constantine, therefore, the history of the church and that