The Writings of Lactantius

<p>The Writings of Lactantius including the Divine Institutes</p><p></p><p>Lactantius moved perhaps by Hosius or Eusebius undertakes the instruction of the Emperor while seeming only to copy the example of Justin writing to Antoninus Pius. The Institutes it is true had been begun at an earlier date; but he economizes for a new purpose the material in which perhaps he had only purposed to follow up the work of his teacher in language better fitted to the polite for refuting heathenism. I cannot doubt that he aimed in pure Latinity to win the Emperor and his court to a deeper and purer conviction of divine truth: to more than a feeble and possibly superstitious idea that it was useless to contend with it and that the gods of the empire were impotent to protect themselves against Christian progress and its masterly exposures of their shame and nothingness.</p>