The Kingdom of God began from the very first days of the Gospel preaching. Every man who welcomed the Good News, who opened the field of his heart to the Good Seed and aided its germination with his good will, every Christian who conformed his life to the evangelical law was a new man.
He had thoughts and feelings other than the feelings and thoughts of those around him, and his manner of being and living was entirely different. The families formed by these new men were no less distinct than the individuals who composed them. The union of man and woman in these families was indissoluble and inviolable. The wife was treated with respect, as a co-heir of the grace that gives eternal life.
The child was a soul entrusted by Providence to the father and mother, who would one day give an account of its upbringing to the Sovereign Judge. The slave was a brother called to the same destiny as his masters. This was far from the conceptions of Plato and Aristotle and from the entire familial and social institution that had been in force for so many centuries. The regeneration of the individual and that of the family called for that of society.
The resistance was of an unheard-of violence and for three centuries caused blood to flow in torrents.
"It was a spectacle extraordinary in every respect," says Mr. Kurth, "that of Roman society. Heir to all civilizations, it had gathered and fertilized the conquests of each. The Orient had bequeathed to it its traditions of absolute power; Greece, the treasure of its philosophical thought and the marvels of its art; the barbarian West, an inexhaustible reserve of men.
This set of resources was maintained by the vigor of the Roman genius, organizer and dominator par excellence... Rome seemed to have taken possession of the earth forever. Everywhere one found the work of its hands. All the nations of the earth came to sit on the tiers of its Colosseum, which had 80,000 seats, and its Circus, which had 360,000.
The Romans considered the Empire as a society embracing all the peoples of the earth, and in official designations, they hailed their emperors with the title of princes of the human race and masters of the world."
It was to this city, to the seat of this empire, that Peter, the poor fisherman of Galilee, went to conquer it in the name of his Master who had just ascended to heaven, and from there to subject the world to His empire. He was seized, crucified, and his disciples by the millions were sacrificed on the altar of Rome, the State-God.
But every drop of Christian blood was a seed that produced a hundredfold. The reign of God was thus established in souls and in families; it had to be established in the State to vivify the whole of society. This was indeed what Peter intended, obedient to the teachings of his divine Master.
When he timidly entered the imperial city, more than one contemptuous glance undoubtedly fell upon him. This man who wore the livery of poverty in his clothes, who had no support but a traveler's staff, who carried all his belongings under his arm, had in his head this mad thought—mad, according to human wisdom: to transform from top to bottom the order of things protected by a gigantic power.
He wanted to change religion and purify morals; to base society, the State, and the family on other foundations; to give men a new way of thinking and living completely different from what had been for long centuries. All this he wanted to obtain not through the workings of a secret society and a clandestinely prepared upheaval, but openly, publicly, in the face of the whole world which would rise up against him, against those who listened to him, and against their work.
What could be more insane? What could be more impossible? And yet this impossibility was realized and this folly was wisdom. By the end of the third century, the faith of Jesus Christ was spread throughout the civilized world; the kingdom of God in souls had penetrated all the provinces of the Roman Empire and had even crossed its borders.
Christian communities lived in most cities, organized on the model that the Apostles had transmitted to the bishops. Correspondence was exchanged between the most distant Churches: they supported each other in the trials of persecution, they denounced to each other the errors of innovators to defend themselves mutually. Each took its part in the life of the universal Church, whose hearth was the Church of Rome, head and model of all the others.
However, the situation of the Church in pagan society remained precarious and painful. It enjoyed no legal existence. Its own organization and hierarchy remained under the action of laws that forbade anything that sought to be independent of the State. It was considered seditious by the very fact of its existence and treated as such.
Yet, instead of weakening it, persecution made it grow. The blood of the martyrs was a seed that gave birth to new Christians, as Tertullian poetically said. The letter of Pope Cornelius in 251 informs us that at that date Christians numbered 30 to 40 thousand out of the 900,000 inhabitants Rome then counted.
By 312, they could have been 70 to 73 thousand. They belonged to all conditions of society, as shown by the epitaphs in the catacombs. God judged the hour had come to reward the constancy of His faithful and to open a new era for the world.
The first years of the fourth century are marked by an intensification of violence against Christianity. The pagan empire mobilizes all its forces to crush the Church, confronting it as in a duel.
The last persecution had bloodied the earth. In 301, an edict left Christians, lay or priests, only the choice between apostasy and death. Galerius, the cruel, took the reins of the empire in 303. Maxentius, son of Maximian Hercules, and Constantine, son of Constantius Chlorus, claimed their rights. Maxentius defeated Galerius, installed himself in Rome, but Constantine, a Christian thanks to his mother Helena, decided to challenge him despite having a less numerous army.
Anxious, Constantine implored the help of his mother's God. One day, a cross with the inscription "BY THIS SIGN, YOU SHALL CONQUER" appeared to him above the sun. Witness to this phenomenon, the entire army was marked. In a dream, Christ confirmed to Constantine the importance of this sign. Constantine then had a cross made on a spear with the Greek initials X.P. of the name of Jesus Christ, replacing the eagle of Jupiter.
Under the protection of this sign, Constantine repelled the enemy troops and reached Rome. The situation of Christianity and the destiny of the world were at stake there. Maxentius was defeated at the Milvian Bridge, and Constantine was welcomed in Rome with indescribable joy. In 313, an edict in Milan not only allowed freedom of worship for Christians but restored property confiscated from the Church.
Another edict freed priests from public duties, ensuring the Church a legal existence. The Lateran Palace was given to Pope Miltiades to become his residence and the seat of ecclesiastical administration.
This period marks a major turning point for Christianity, with Constantine playing a key role in its acceptance and development.
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Source: The Social Reign of Our Lord Jesus Christ – Msgr. Delassus – 1913