Thus in the thirty years from the death of Constantine to the accession of Theodosius the Great, while the Church continued to grow in wealth, it can have made little progress politically, and it certainly made none morally. The law of Valentinian against the gain-seeking monks and priests of Rome is the testimony of a Christian emperor to the new demoralization set up by his Church. Perhaps on pagan pressure, but apparently with emphasis, he forbade ecclesiastics to receive personal gifts or legacies from the women of property to whom they acted as spiritual advisers. Such a law was of course evaded by such expedients as trusteeships: greed was not to be baulked by legal vetoes. The higher clergy showed the same instincts; and in the final struggle of Damasus and Ursinus to secure by physical force the episcopal chair of Rome (366), one hundred and thirty-seven dead bodies were counted in the basilica, Damasus having hired gladiators to carry his point. In the provinces, doubtless, the church was often better represented; and the new species of chorepiscopi or rural bishops must have included some estimable men; but at all the great Christian centres reigned violence, greed, and hate. In North Africa the feud between the Donatists and the rest of the Church had reached the form of a chronic civil war, in which Donatist peasant fanatics, called Circumcelliones, met the official persecution by guerilla warfare of the savagest sort. In the East, the furious strifes between Arians and Athanasians were sufficient to discredit the entire Church as a political factor; and the better pagans saw in it a much worse ethical failure than could be charged on their own philosophies. "Make me bishop of Rome," said the pagan prefect Praetextatus jestingly to Damasus, "and I will be a Christian." What rational element lay in Arianism was countervailed by the corruption set up by court favour; and orthodoxy found its account in popular ignorance. One of the last notably philosophic heretics was Photinus, bishop of Sirmium, who in 343 revived the doctrine of a "modal" Trinity. Anathematized and ostracized by Athanasians and Arians alike, he died in exile.
The accession (379) of Theodosius, made co-emperor by Gratian, son of Valentinian, on the fall of Valens, marks the final establishment of Trinitarian Christianity, with the official suppression of Arianism and paganism. The young Gratian had been partly educated under Bishop Ambrose of Milan, one of the first notable types of masterful ecclesiastic; and under that influence he confiscated the lands of the pagan temples in the West, withdrew the privileges of the priests, and caused to be removed from the Senate at Rome the ancient and sacred statue of the Goddess Victory, formerly removed by Constantius and restored by Julian. Fiscal needs seem to have had much to do with the confiscations, for the economic life of the western empire was steadily sinking. The young emperor did not attempt to prohibit pagan worship or abolish the right of the temples to receive legacies; and though he is said to have refused the title of Pontifex Maximus it seems to have been officially given to him. His anti-pagan policy, however, seems to have counted for something in his unpopularity, which became so great that when Maximus revolted in Britain and invaded Gaul, Gratian was abandoned on all hands.