Section 349
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318 ECCLESIASTICAL HISTORY able stations in the provinces. We may also add Gorgonius, equally celebrated with him; and so many others that were honoured with the same distinction as these on account of the divine word. The same privileges one could observe conferred on the rulers in every church, who were courted and honoured with the greatest subserviency by all the rulers and governors. Who could describe those vast collections of men that flocked to the religion of Christ, and those multitudes crowding in from every city, and the illustrious concourse in the houses of worship ? On whose account, not content with the ancient buildings, they erected spacious churches from the foundation in all the cities. These, advancing in the lapse of time, and daily increasing in magnitude and improvement, were not restrained by any odium or hostility. Nor was any malignant daemon able to infatuate, nor human machinations prevent them, as long as the providential hand of God superintended and guarded his people as the worthy objects of his care. But when, by reason of excessive liberty, we sunk into negligence and sloth, one envying and reviling an other in different ways, and we were almost, as it were, on the point of taking up arms against each other, and were assailing each other with words as with darts and spears, prelates inveigh ing against prelates, and people rising up against people, and hypocrisy and dissimulation had arisen to the greatest height of malignity, then the divine judgment, which usually proceeds with a lenient hand, whilst the multitudes were yet crowding into the church, with gentle and mild visitations began to afflict its epis copacy ; the persecution having begun with those brethren that were in the army. But, as if destitute of all sensibility, we were not prompt in measures to appease and propitiate the Deity ; some, indeed, like atheists, regarding our situation as unheeded and unobserved by a providence, we added one wickedness and misery to another. But some that appeared to be our pastors, deserting the law of piety, were inflamed against each other with mutual strifes, only accumulating quarrels and threats, rival ship, hostility and hatred to each other, only anxious to assert the government as a kind of sovereignty for themselves. Then, as Jeremiah says, " the Lord in his anger darkened the daughter of Sion, and hurled