How gladly must Sylvester have sped back to Rome over the long Milvian Way, as soon as he could resume his sacred duties in the city! He must have been there when Constantine, with his great host, paused at the “Saxa rubra” (the red rocks over which I have often wandered, seeking for wild flowers), near the Milvian Bridge, depressed and anxious, and very fearful that the army he led was not strong enough to overcome the usurper, Maxentius, who had fortified himself behind its walls. In this month of May, 1913, Catholics from all over the world are thronging to Rome to take part in the sixteen-hundredth anniversary of that day. For Constantine, hesitating to attack, was standing without his camp, gazing at the western sky, towards which the sun was sinking, as the chroniclers tell us, thinking of what lay before him, thinking, too, of what lay behind—of the long years during which he had half believed in Christianity without being made a Christian; thinking of what would happen to his soul should he, still unbaptised, be slain in the now inevitable conflict; thinking, we may be sure, of his good mother, Helena, over there in Constantinople, storming Heaven with prayers for his safety. It was all enough to make even an Emperor thoughtful, and Constantine was a man who took both this life and the next very seriously.
Then, as officers and men watched their leader’s face grow darker and more gloomy, and the reflection of his melancholy began to gain them all, “airy and excellent” the vision came. Resting on the setting sun as on a pedestal, and paling that glory by its own more dazzling splendour, a gigantic cross flamed out across the cloudless sky, and as all gazed, terror-stricken and breathless, these words wrote themselves in fire against the blue: “In hoc vinces”[23]—“In this thou shalt conquer!” The portent hung for many minutes, some say for an hour, and then slowly withdrew into the empyrean, and the empty sky and the empty Campagna, the gleaming host and the proud rebel city, alone remained.
And Constantine conquered. Maxentius, doomed, came out to meet him, and there was great slaughter, in which the upstart thief of the Purple died no honourable death, but was pushed off the bridge in the furious mêlée and choked in Tiber’s mud. And Constantine caused the Eagles to be replaced by the Cross on his standards, and entered in triumph to throw himself at the feet of Sylvester and, holding up his poor leprous[24] hands in piteous entreaty, to beg for health and baptism. Gladly and with great thanksgiving the Pope baptised him, and the water that washed away his sins cleansed his flesh, so that when he came up out of the sacred fountain there was no mark of leprosy on his body or of guilt upon his soul—“and the Church had peace.”
