How Christianity saw off its rivals and became the universal church
In the reign of Constantine, whose conversion to Christianity in AD 310 set the entire Roman world on a course to becoming Christian, a Palestinian scholar named Eusebius pondered the reasons for the triumph of his faith. Naturally, he saw behind it the guiding hand of God; but he did not rest content with that as an explanation. The purposes of heaven were to be traced in the patterns of earthly history. ‘It was not merely as a consequence of human agency that the greater part of the world’s peoples came to be joined under the sole rule of Rome — nor that this should have coincided with the lifetime of Jesus.’ A global faith, Eusebius argued, had been rendered possible by a globalised age.
