THE DECLINE AND FALL

260

chap, tages might be derived from the acquisition of

___an imperial proselyte, he was distinguished by

the splendour of his purple, rather than by thesuperiority of wisdom or virtue, from the manythousands of his subjects who had embracedthe doctrines of Christianity . Nor can it bedeemed incredible, that the mind of an unlet-tered soldier should have yielded to the weightof evidence, which, in a more enlightened age,has satisfied or subdued the reason of a Gro-tius, a Pascal, or a Locke. In the midst of theincessant labours of his great office, this soldieremployed, or affected to employ, the hours ofthe night in the diligent study of the scriptures,and the composition of theological discourses;which he afterwards pronounced in the pre-sence of a numerous and applauding audience.In a very long discourse, which is still extant,the royal preacher expatiates on the variousproofs of religion ; but he dwells with peculiarcomplacency on the Sibylline verses, m and theThe fourth fourth eclogue of Virgil .” Forty years beforeVirgil!* ° the birth of Christ, the Mantuan bard, as if in-spired by the celestial muse of Isaiah, had cele-brated, with all the pomp of oriental metaphor,the return of the virgin, the fall of the serpent,the approaching birth of a godlike child, the off-spring of the great Jupiter, who should expiate

m See Constantin. Orat. ad Sanctos, c 19, 20. He chiefly dependson a mysterious acrostic, composed in the sixth age rtftcr the delugeby the Erythraean S M l, and translated hy Cicero into Latin . Theinitial letters of the thirty-four Greek veises form this prophetic sen-tence : Jesus Christ , Son of God, Saviour of the World .

n In his paraphrase of Virgil , the emperor has frequently assistedand improved the literal sense of the Latin text. See Blondel des Si-bylles, 1. i, c. 14, 15, 1G.