empire. It aiourished religious fanaticism, often raised storms of popular agitation, and rushed passionately into the controversies of theological parties ; generally, it is true, on the side of orthodoxy, but often, as at the Ephesian " council of robbers," in favor of heresy, and especially in behalf of the crudest superstition. For the simple, divine way of salvation in the gospel, it substituted an arbitrary, eccentric, ostentatious, and pretentious sanctity. It darkened the all-sufficient merits of Clirist by the glitter of the over-meritorious works of man. It measured virtue by the quantity of outward exercises instead of the quality of the in- ward disposition, and disseminated self-righteousness and an anxious, legal, and mechanical religion. It favored the idola- trous veneration of Mary and of saints, the worship of images and relics, and all sorts of superstitious and pious fraud. It circulated a mass of visions and miracles, which, if true, far surpassed the miracles of Christ and the apostles and set all the laws of nature and reason at defiance. The Nicene age is full of the most absurd monks' fables, and is in this respect not a whit behind the darkest of the middle ages.' Monasticism * The monkish miracles, with which the VitcB Palrum of tiie Jesuit Eosweyde and the Acta Sanctorum swarm, often contradict all the laws of nature and of rea- TOL. II. — 12 178 THIKD PERIOD. A.D. 311-590. lowered the standard of general morality in proportion as it set itself above it and claimed a corresponding higher merit ; and it exerted in general a demoralizing influence on the people, who came to consider themselves \\\q jprofanuni vulgus rnimdi, and to live accordingly. Hence the frequent lamentations, not only of Salvian, but of Chrysostom and of Augustine, over the indifl'erence and laxness of the Christianity of the day ; hence son, and would be hardly worthy of mention, but that they come from such fathers as Jerome, Rufinus, Severus, Palladius, and Theodoret, and go to characterize the Nicene age. We are far from rejecting all and every one as falsehood and decep- tion, and accepting the judgment of Isaac Taylor (Ancient Christianity, ii. 106) : " The Nicene miracles are of a kind which shocks every sentiment of gravity, of de- cency, and of piety : — in their obvious features they are childish, horrid, blasphemous, and foul." Much more cautious is the opinion of Robertson (Hist, of the Christian Church, i. 812) and other Protestant historians, who suppose that, together with the innocent illusions of a heated imagination and the fabrications of intentional fraud, there must have been also much that was real, though in the nature of the case an exact sifting is impossible. But many of these stories are too much even for Roman credulity, and are either entirely omitted or at least greatly reduced and modified by critical historians. We read not only of innumerable visions, prophe- cies, healings of the sick and the possessed, but also of raising