That there were no Christian soldiers in the first and second centuries, has already been made apparent.

That Christianity also was purest in these times, there can be no doubt.  Let us look at the character which is given of the first Christians by Athenagoras, Justin Martyr, Minucius Felix, and others of the early Christian writers.  According to these they were plain and neat in their apparel, and frugal in their furniture.  They were temperate in their eating and drinking.  They relinquished all the diversions of the times, in which they saw any tendency to evil.  They were chaste in their conversation, tempering mirth with gravity.  They were modest and chaste in their deportment and manners.  They were punctual to their words and engagements.  They were such lovers of the truth, that, on being asked, if they were Christians, they never denied it, though death was the consequence of such a religious profession.  They loved each other as brethren, and called one another by that name.  They were kind, and courteous, and charitable, beyond all example, to others.  They abstained from all manner of violence.  They prayed for those who persecuted them.  They were patterns of humility and patience.  They made no sacrifice of their consciences, but would persevere in that which was right, never refusing to die for their religion.  This is the character, which is uniformly given of them by the Christian writers of those times.

That their conduct was greatly altered in the third century, where we are now to view it, we may collect from indisputable authority.  I stated in the former section, that a Christian soldier was punished for refusing to wear a garland, like the rest of his comrades, on a public occasion.  This man, it appears, had been converted in the army, and objected to the ceremony on that account.  Now Tertullian tells us, that this soldier was blamed for his unseasonable zeal, as it was called, by some of the Christians at that time, though all Christians before considered the wearing of such a garland as unlawful and profane.  In this century there is no question but the Christian discipline began to relax.  To the long peace the church enjoyed from the death of Antoninus to the tenth year of Severus, is to be ascribed the corruption that ensued.  This corruption we find to have spread rapidly; for the same Tertullian was enabled to furnish us with the extraordinary instance of manufacturers of idols being admitted into the ecclesiastical order.  Many corruptions are also noticed in this century by other writers.  Cyprian complained of them, as they existed in the middle, and Eusebius, as they existed at the end of it, and both attributed it to the peace, or to the ease and plenty, which the Christians had enjoyed.  The latter gives us a melancholy account of their change.  They had begun to live in fine houses, and to indulge in luxuries.  But, above all, they had begun to be envious, and quarrelsome, and to dissemble, and to cheat, and to falsify their word, so that they lost the character, which Pliny, an adversary to their religion, had been obliged to give of them, and which they had retained for more than a century, as appears by their own writers.