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inscription in Greek, "By this sign conquer". Whether this was an optical illusion, or
even a legend, it is difficult to say, but something affected him deeply and through this he
professed conversion. No one can say with definiteness that this was the real work of the
Spirit of God. He afterwards retained some of his old superstitions, but certainly showed
that he believed in the God of the Christians, and shortly afterwards he joined with the
fellow-emperor Licinius in issuing a decree giving full toleration to the Christian faith,
restoring to the churches all places of worship which had been confiscated, making good
all losses; and giving unconditional religious liberty to all, so that Christianity now
enjoyed complete freedom throughout the Roman world. This was indeed a startling
reversal of affairs, but while it was of great importance to the church, it was far from
being an unmixed blessing. Constantine maintained close contact with the bishops and
did his best to settle the various controversies which arose at this time. This led to an
intervention by the State in church affairs which proved disastrous later on to spiritual
liberty. The Christian leaders allowed the Emperor to have more say in internal church
affairs than was his due. The linking of political power with spiritual authority proved
what has always been found to be true in experience--the corrupting tendency of power,
so that two extremes began to merge, viz., worldly, proud and domineering ecclesiastics,
and on the other hand asceticism and monasticism. Spiritual liberty soon became
restricted by an increase of centralized control and organization which afterwards
developed into Roman Catholicism.
Even worse was the influx of pagans into the church under the disguise of
Christianity. In his The Spreading Flame, Professor F. F. Bruce writes:
"Constantine . . . . . showed clearly in a variety of ways that Christians enjoyed his
special favour. Christianity thus became fashionable, which was not really a good thing.
It meant a considerable ingress of Christianized pagans into the church--pagans who
had learned the rudiments of Christian doctrine and had been baptized, but who remained
largely pagan in their thoughts and ways. The mob in such great cities as Rome and
Antioch and Alexandria became Christian in name, but in fact remained the unruly mob."
It is most important to grasp the implications of this, for it explains how, together with
the falling away from N.T. truth that we have seen, Christianized paganism invaded
Roman Catholicism at the beginning, and has remained ever since, infecting in some
measure Protestantism as well. Paganism at its source goes back to the book of Genesis
with the founding of Babel by Nimrod and his wife Semiramis. All pagan legends can
finally be traced back here, as Hislop has shown in his book The Two Babylons. This
was the beginning of Babylonianism, the organized system of Satan which the N.T.
describes as "the lie", and is the very negation of all the truth of God and the position and
person of the Lord Jesus Christ. Such a system is all the more dangerous with a Christian
veneer, for few seem to have their eyes skinned to see it at its true worth. It is difficult to
estimate its blinding power, operated by the god of this age over the minds of men. No
wonder as this grew and held sway over the then known world, the terrible darkness of
the Middle Ages set in.
In 604A.D. Pope Gregory the Great died, and his reign marked a great step forward in
the development of the power of the Roman church and its erroneous doctrines, which is
in such startling contrast to the truth of the N.T. Scriptures. We now find papal claims to