INTRODUCTORY NOTE. As an appropriate appendage to "Cave's Primitive Christianity," the reader is presented, in the following pages from the same Author, with a condensed account of the gradual triumph of the Gospel over the expiring efforts of Polytheism, from the accession of Constantine, the first Christian emperor, to the establishment of Christianity as the religion of the empire, under Theodosius the Great. It will readily be admitted, that the measures adopted for the propagation of the faith, were by no means free from that persecuting spirit, which was characteristic of the times, and that many of the erroneous principles and corrupt practices which prevail at the present day origi.. nated at this period. Many of the heathens, for instance, were easily led to identify the veneration of believers for their early martyrs, with their own deification of departed heroes; and a compromise was soon effected in favour of the church, which naturally ended in that idolatrous worship of saints and angels still subsisting in the church of Rome. Obscured, however, as was the brightness of the Gospel light by the corruptions thus early introduced, still its benign influence, during the dark ages which succeeded, cannot fail to be recognized amidst the clouds of falsehood and superstition which overspread the world. Gibbon himself, with all his hostility to the religion of the Cross, has been compelled, however reluctantly, to acknowledge the powerful effect which it produced in mitigating the horrors of war, in preventing the total extinction of learning and civilization, and in protecting the defenceless and the oppressed from cruelty and violence. At the Reformation, the smothered flame was again rekindled, and the enlightened believer bows in humble adoration of that gracious Being, who has stamped the Christian Revelation as divine, by the otherwise unaccountable success of its first propagation, by its signal preservation amid the gloom of barbarous ignorance, and by its emergence in all the brightness of its pristine purity from the dark mist of idolatry and superstition in which it was involved. *Gibbon's Decline and Fall, chap. xvi. AN HISTORICAL ACCOUNT, &c. SECTION I. The state of Paganism under the reign of Constantine the Great. By what means and methods the Christian religion made its own way into the world, and, unassisted by any secular power or interest, triumphed over all the opposition that was made against it, has been considered in another place. The subject of this discourse will be to observe by what degrees paganism, that part of it especially that was the public and standing religion of the Roman empire, a religion that for so many ages had influenced the minds of men, and seemed firmly rooted by custom, laws, and an inveterate prescription, was driven into corners, and in effect banished out of the world. The account whereof we shall briefly deduce from the time that the empire became Chris tian. Constantine the Great was born in Britain, as all impartial writers, not biassed either by envy at ours, or by a concernment for the honour of their |