The sermon was quickly finished and the people filed out. The Empress and Lady Valeria went down an aisle along one side of the almost empty room, however, and knelt in prayer before the altar with the bearded priest who had greeted them, so Constantine moved out into the foyer or vestibule to wait for them. As he stood there, wondering why the words he had just heard should fill him with a strange unease, he saw the priest called Eusebius enter the foyer from the other side and hurry across it.
“Tribune Constantinus!” he cried, a smile of welcome on his face. “Have you become one of us?”
“No. The Empress and Lady Valeria are inside.”
“I saw you come in, and was glad.”
“Why?”
Eusebius admitted
“I am vain enough to want you to hear my sermon, of course,” Eusebius admitted, “but that was not the real reason. I have just come to Antioch from Caesarea. When I learned that you were here, I planned to seek you out and thank you for what you did for our people in Alexandria.”
“For your people? I don’t remember it.”
“When the Emperor’s horse slipped, you reminded him that blood had touched its knees.”
“But that was the fulfillment of a prophecy by the priests of Apollo at Caesarea.”
“Or an act of God through you as his agent, to keep thousands of innocent people from being killed?”
“I have heard that you Christians speak ill of pagan priests who twist events to fit their own soothsaying,” Constantine said somewhat rudely. “Yet here you are doing the same thing.”
Eusebius gave him a quick probing glance. “So you too have felt the pull,” he said. “And you too are kicking against the goad.” Perhaps because it had been a long day and he was tired, or because Eusebius’ sermon had moved him in a way he could not understand, Constantine found himself resenting the implication that he was being used even by the man the Christians claimed to be the son of their god like a piece being moved about on a board during a game, with no volition of his own.
“I suppose you will be telling me next that I shall see a vision, like your man Paul,” he said harshly.
Read More about Eusebius explained
