Peter's Rock in Mohammed's Flood, from St. Gregory the Great to St. Leo III

Pope Symmachus in 498 followed Pope Anastasius. And here acts of great importance took place. The Acacian schism had then divided the East from Rome. Zeno, in order to unite the Monophysites with the Catholics, had drawn up an ambiguous formulary of union called the Henotikon. The emperor Anastasius was most desirous to maintain this formulary. He also wished to recover union with Rome. When the Senator Festus came to Constantinople on the embassy of Theodorich, he promised the emperor that he would induce Pope Anastasius to accept this formulary. But Festus, returned to Rome, found Anastasius dead, and Symmachus chosen by the greater part of the clergy to succeed. He saw that there was no chance of inducing Symmachus to accept the formulary. But Festus was able to raise a schism, and set up, as Antipope, Laurentius. After great troubles, which lasted four years, Symmachus was established: but neither the emperor nor Theodorich exercised or claimed authority to confirm his election.

In 514 Theodorich, the king of Italy, allowed the election of Pope Hormisdas to take place without interference: and again the election of Pope John I. in 523. But upon the death of that martyred Pope in 526, instead of his former indulgence, a state of suspicion and anger against Rome had taken possession of the mind of Theodorich. He imposed upon the Romans the choice of Pope Felix IV. It is supposed that at this time he enacted that in future no one should ascend the papal chair without the confirmation of himself and his successors. Thus only can it be explained that after this, on the death of a Pope the Apostolic Chair remained vacant sometimes for months, and a large sum had to be paid into the Gothic treasury for the deed of confirmation.

Very shortly after the death of Pope John I., and the fellow-victims, Boethius and Symmachus, Theodorich died, and was succeeded by his grandson, Athalarich, eight years old, under the tutelage of his mother, Amalasunta. During her regency Pope Felix IV. died in 530. The electors were divided into a Gothic-Roman and a national-Roman party. The candidate of the former, Bonifacius II., and of the latter, Dioscorus, were both elected two days after the death of Pope Felix, and both consecrated on the following Sunday: and so without any confirmation from Ravenna. But the death of Dioscorus after twenty-eight days prevented a schism, and Boniface was fully recognised as Pope. Boniface, in dread of troubles which would arise at his death, ventured to summon the clergy to St. Peter's, and laid before them a decree to subscribe: upon which he declared the deacon Vigilius to be his successor. But feeling speedily that this act was contrary to the existing laws of the Church, he called a second assembly of the clergy, the senate, and the people of Rome, declared himself to have violated the freedom and sanctity of the Papacy, and caused in their presence the paper nominating Vigilius to be burnt.

The next election took place in 532, according to the usual conditions. The young king, Athalarich, was made to defer the confirmation of Pope John II. for two months. The state of Rome in the meantime was frightful. Every man sought to plunder the goods of the Church. The Senate had passed a decree strictly forbidding the alienation of church goods by candidates for the Papacy. It was disregarded: and the only resource for the new Pope was to appeal to the king and beg him to confirm the senate's decree. Athalarich decided that the decree should be inscribed on a marble tablet, and set up in front of the court of St. Peter's. But the Gothic king's help was purchased dearly, and the fee for confirming a Pope was established at 3000 gold pieces.

Such in fifty-one years was the result of Odoacer meddling with the Papal election. Not only had the right to confirm been allowed to the civil ruler of Rome, but a heavy money payment had been imposed for the confirmation, and delay superadded.

In that year, 534, the young King Athalarich perished at the age of eighteen by his own excesses. The Queen Amalasunta speedily lost her power. She nominated her cousin, Theodatus, of the royal blood of Amali, king. He repaid her by allowing her to be murdered. His name and character became odious to the Romans. On the death of Pope John II. in 535 he allowed the free choice of the Roman Agapetus to take place in seven days. But he exercised great tyranny over the Romans. He forced Pope Agapetus to go to Constantinople as his ambassador. When that Pope died, as we have seen, in the eastern capital, he imposed on the Romans the choice of Silverius as Pope, threatening with death any one who did not consent to his appointment.

This is the briefest possible record of how the original liberty of the Roman clergy and people to elect the Pope was treated by the foreign Arian rulers, Odoacer, Theodorich, Athalarich, and Theodatus. Then the emperor Justinian became by right of conquest immediate lord of Rome, and seized without scruple upon the appointment and confirmation of the Popes. The act of his empress Theodora, in her violent deposition of Pope Silverius, is the first specimen of Byzantine conduct when it enters by right of conquest upon Italian territory. That the Romans had every reason to wish for the extinction of foreign, which was also heretical, domination, must be clear to every one who follows history in its detail. But likewise the example with which Byzantine domination in Italy opens will suffice to represent to us in a living picture the permanent relation of the Popes to the eastern or Greek empire. If arbitrary violations of the freedom of Papal election by the Gothic kings may be given as the exception, it became by frequent repetitions under Justinian the rule. As the patriarchal see of Constantinople had long been given only to select Court favourites, and taken away from the occupants at every change of imperial inclination, the same plan was pursued henceforth with the filling of the Apostolical See. The emperor issued his edict: the Romans and the Pope were expected to obey. Not even the domain of the Faith was kept free to the Pope. In this also the attempt of the emperors was to lower the chief dignity of the Church to be the echo of their commands.

From Justinian onwards the Byzantine emperors claimed and exercised the right to confirm the papal election.

When the ill-treated Vigilius died at Syracuse, returning from his unhappy sojourn of eight years at Constantinople, Justinian caused the archdeacon Pelagius, who had been nuncio at Constantinople, to be elected his successor. In like manner John III. in 560, and Benedict I. in 574 were elected under pressure from the emperor. But in 568 the Lombards came into Italy, and at the death of Benedict I. in 578 they were pressing Rome so severely that no one could undertake the journey to Constantinople to ask for imperial confirmation. So the Book of the Popes says, “Pelagius, a Roman, was consecrated without the command of the emperor, because the Lombards were besieging the City of Rome, and Italy was greatly laid waste by them. There was such calamity as had not occurred in memory of man.” In 590 St. Gregory the Great waited six months for his election to be approved at Constantinople. What use was made by the eastern emperor of the right to confirm the Papal election from the time of St. Gregory to the breaking out of the Iconoclast persecution has already been recounted. The last instance of this degrading mark of servitude was the confirmation of Pope Gregory III.'s election in 731 by the exarch of Ravenna. From that time forth the Popes elect were no longer confirmed by the emperor or his delegate; and in 756 the hand of a western ruler made them sovereign princes, and the much injured Italy was relieved from eastern oppression so far at least as regarded Rome and the central and northern provinces.

What took place at the death of a Pope was after this fashion. The representation of the see was vested in the three chief officers; the primicerius of the notaries, the archpriest and the archdeacon informed of the fact the exarch of Ravenna. They addressed their letter thus: “To the most excellent and distinguished lord, long to be preserved by God for us in the discharge of his supreme office, N., ex-consul, patricius, and exarch of Italy, N., the archpriest, N., the archdeacon, N., the primicerius of the notaries, keeping the place of the holy Apostolic See”. The exsequies of the late Pope took place, and a three days' fast and prayer preceded the act of election. In this act took part the higher clergy with the whole spirituality, the more important magistrates of the city, the nobility, the deputies of the people, and such Greek troops as might be present in the city. When the election was completed the elect was conducted in solemn procession to the Lateran, where he received the first homage of the people. The electors subscribed the decree of election which in the meantime had been prepared, and laid it up for future record in the archive. A second shorter copy was sent to the emperor at Constantinople, which ended with the words: “wherefore we, all your servants, in our sorrow beseech that the piety of our masters may favourably receive the entreaties of their servants, and by their grant of their permission would allow the desires of their petitioners to take effect for the good of their empire by their own command. So that in virtue of their sacred letters we, being under the same pastor, may solicit without ceasing the almighty God and the Prince of the Apostles, who has granted the appointment of a worthy governor of his Church, for the life and empire of our most serene masters.”

Yet more submissive is the tone of the letter to the exarch. After the election has been fully described, it continues: “This being so, most exalted God-protected master, we yet more earnestly entreat that by God's quick operation inspiring your heart you would give command to adorn the Apostolic See with the perfect consecration of our father and pastor, as by the grace of Christ happily and faithfully discharging your execution of the imperial supremacy, so that we, your humble servants, seeing our desire more rapidly fulfilled, may be enabled to return unceasing thanks to God, to the imperial clemency, and to your admirable government willed by God. Thus, by the appointment of the Pontiff of the Apostolic See, our spiritual pastor, we may pour forth continual prayers for the life and safety and complete victory of our most Christian masters. For we know that the prayer of him whom by God's will we elect to the supreme pontifical dignity, will propitiate the divine power, and obtain for the Roman empire all the success which it can desire. It will also preserve your own power, under God's protection, for the ruling of this captive Italian province, for the protection of us, all your servants, and for the continuation of long deeds of arms.”

The three Papal officers also informed the archbishop of Ravenna, the magistracy, and the Roman nuntio there, of what had taken place, beseeching their assistance that the confirmation of the election might speedily be given. When this arrived from Constantinople and Ravenna, the Pope elect received consecration. The seven regions of Rome were represented in a procession which conducted him from the sacristy of St. Peter's to the Confession of the Prince of the Apostles, where he recited his profession of faith. Thereupon Mass began to the Gloria, the bishops of Albano and Porto led him to the bishop of Ostia, who was seated in an elevated chair. They held the gospels over his head, and said the first and second prayer. Then the bishop of Ostia completed the proper consecration, while the archdeacon laid the pallium upon him. After this, the new Pope ascended the papal throne, gave his blessing to all the priests, and proceeded with the sacrifice of the Mass.

A papal vacancy was reckoned from the burial of the deceased Pope to the consecration of the Pope elect.

This power of confirming the election of a Pope, in complete derogation from the original liberty, which had only once been broken by the tyranny of the first Constantius, in the year 355, down to the Arian occupation of Rome by Odoacer, appears to have been exercised from the last days of Theodorich in 526 down to Pope Gregory III. in 731. The emperor Constantine the Bearded, had, after the Sixth Council, suffered Pope Benedict II., in 684, to be freely elected: but his son, Justinian II., reimposed the yoke.

The weight of imperial pressure upon Rome had been considerably affected by the Lombard occupation of the northern provinces of Italy, beginning in 568. The capture of Italy as a province, won for Justinian by the conquest of Narses, was only completed in 555. In thirteen years the Lombards entered upon the country which the Goths had well nigh reduced to ruin. Lombard aggression ran well nigh side by side with Byzantine oppression for two centuries. Right in the midst of both the Apostolic See was placed. In 596, the great St. Gregory complained that he had been keeping watch and ward against these new northern robbers for twenty-eight years, which is the second arm of Byzantine oppression.

The exarch, in the judgment of the despotic Justinian and his successors, was a viceroy of all Italy, planted in the fortress of Ravenna, one side of which was guarded by the sea, the other by marshes. Thence Theodorich ruled: there he was buried: and the Byzantine only felt secure in the Gothic stronghold. Defenceless Rome was stretched out beneath his feet in central Italy, or, if it had a defence, it was that the deathless spirit of the Apostolic See lived within the walls of Aurelian, and animated by its guardianship the often broken and rudely repaired towers of the world's ancient mistress. The exarch was the choice instrument of the emperor's despotism. St. Gregory, in his fourteen years' struggle with all the elements of civil dissolution, accounts the exarch Romanus as his worst enemy. He was always ready to combine with the Lombard, then in the depths of savagery and ignorance, against his own lord's liege vassals in Rome. Thus St. Gregory unbosoms himself to Sebastian, bishop of Sirmium: – “Words cannot express what we suffer from your friend, the lord Romanus. I would say, in a word, that his malice towards us surpasses the swords of the Lombards. The enemies who destroy us seem to us kinder than the magistrates of the Commonwealth, who wear out our thoughts by their ill-will, their plundering, and their deceit. At one and the same time to have the care of bishops and clergy, of monasteries and people, to watch carefully against enemies in ambuscade, to be exposed even to suspicion by the deceit and ill-will of rulers – the labour and the sorrow of this your brotherhood can the better weigh by the purity of your affection for me who suffer it.” These words may fitly introduce us to the Byzantine exarchate as a government. In the thirty years succeeding St. Gregory, the exarch appears as the great manager of Papal elections: from which his least hostile act would be to extort a fee as great, at least, as that laid down in the last Gothic time as 3000 gold coins. Now and then, as opportunity offered, he would enjoy the greater luxury of plundering the Lateran treasury of the Church at his leisure: as done by the exarch Isaac in 638, who was immortalised for the deed in the inscription of his tomb at Ravenna, as the most faithful servant of his most serene masters at Constantinople. The exarch Olympius, in 648, received from his master, Constans II., the higher commission to murder St. Martin, as he was giving holy Communion. But the attempt was frustrated, as was believed at the time, by a divine intervention. However, the exarch Theodore Kalliopa, sent for the special purpose, succeeded in carrying off Pope St. Martin, as he lay ill before the altar of the Lateran, five years later in 653, and placing him in the hands of Constans II., to be condemned for high treason, in that he had not waited for the confirmation of his election by Constans, but, instead, had condemned his heresy in the great Council which he summoned at Rome. In the interval of twenty-five years, from the death of St. Martin to the opening of the Sixth Council, the exarchs were faithful to the imperial tradition until Constantine the Bearded renounced the heresy of which his father, Constans, and his grandfather, Heraclius, had been the chief supporters, while they were nursed in it by a succession of Byzantine patriarchs. But when Justinian II. had followed, the exarch John Platina, in 687, hurried from Ravenna to Rome to hinder the election of the great pontiff, Sergius. Finding it accomplished, he was obliged to content himself with fining the new Pope to the extent of a hundred pounds' weight of gold, that being the bribe which the unsuccessful candidate had promised him if he would come to Rome to secure his election. Four years afterwards, Justinian II., unable to induce Pope Sergius to accept the decrees of his Council in Trullo, or to accept the place for his signature of them which the emperor had provided in a line between his own signature and that of his patriarch, sent Zacharias not an exarch, but a guardsman, to repeat, if possible, in the person of Pope Sergius, what had been done forty years before in the person of Pope St. Martin. But, instead, the emperor's own troops caused the guardsman to tremble for his life. His only place of refuge was under the bed in the Pope's own chamber: the Pope's intercession alone saved the imperial emissary from a fatal outburst of Italian wrath. Yet ten years later, under the upstart emperor Apsimar, in his short reign, another exarch, Theophylact, was again repulsed from his execution of an intended attack on the Pope by Italian soldiers. Once more, when Pope Constantine, obeying an imperial letter of the restored Justinian II., had left Rome for Constantinople, several chief Papal officers were summarily executed at Rome. Thus the five attempts on the life of the Pope Gregory II. made by exarchs or guardsmen, at the bidding of the emperor Leo III., in his Iconoclastic fury, were but the consistent continuation of the spirit shown by the exarchs, and fostered and supported by the emperors, from the time of St. Gregory's adversary, the Lord Romanus.

During these two hundred years, from the first inroad of the Lombards, nothing could be more embarrassing than the civil position of the Popes. Beside the main body of the Lombards, occupying the great plain of North Italy, with their capital at Pavia, there were two duchies, one of Spoleto, immediately to the north of Rome and its territory, and another of Benevento, holding a considerable portion of Italian territory near Naples. This city, with other seaports, continued in possession of the empire. The Lombard kings were evermore trying to bring their outlying duchies into closer obedience to the royal power. Again the fortress and territory of Ravenna, the imperial metropolis, lay further to the north, touching the Lombard possessions. The Lombards, when they came into Italy, were so little advanced in political science of government, so little coherent among themselves, that at one time they were divided among thirty-six chiefs, so many heads of robbers and devastating bands, barbarous and un-Christian. There can be no doubt that the aim of the Lombard kings from the beginning had been to make themselves masters of Rome, and to rule the whole of Italy as a kingdom. The example and success of Theodorich was fresh before them. Justinian's success under his generals Belisarius and Narses was even younger than the glory of the great Gothic king. Gregory the Great had laid a foundation for christianising the Lombard people in his friendship with the great and good Queen Theodelinda. In process of time they had become Catholic. Their king, Liutprand, had caused the relics of St. Augustine, which had been carried from Africa to Sardinia during the Vandal persecution, to be brought to his capital city, Pavia, where the shrine of the greatest of the fathers still abides in honour. Pope Zacharias, by his personal dignity, prevailed over both Liutprand and Rachis. But the contest for the dominion of Italy went on in spite of reverence for the Apostolic See. The people were Catholic, but tumultous and stubborn. After a long-continued struggle of various success, the king Liutprand seemed to be on the point of incorporating the Spolentine and Beneventan duchies, of closing upon Rome, and expelling the emperor from Ravenna. Upon his death, and the retirement of Rachis, Aistulf was uniting all the Lombard force for the attainment of their purpose from the beginning, to expel the emperor from Italy, and to make the Pope a Lombard subject. He went so far as to put a poll-tax on the Roman duchy, and to style himself king of Italy. There the Carlovingian hand arrested him: and the keys of the cities which the Lombard had won from the Byzantine, and Pipin from the Lombard, laid by the gift of Pipin on the tomb of the chief apostle, signified to all men that his successor had become a temporal prince, after forming Rome in the centre of a captive province from a heathen city into a spiritual capital during the unceasing calamity of three centuries. We have scarcely any record of the indescribable sorrows which the Lombard in his aggressive policy, and the Byzantine in his continuous resistance, made up of treachery and bribery added to insufficient military power, inflicted on the cities and the people of Italy: nor of what the Popes endured in their loyal acknowledgment of their duty as subjects, and their unbroken tenacity in maintaining the faith and government of the Church against the succession of adventurers who mounted the Byzantine throne. These culminated in the seven revolutions terminated by that of Leo III. Then the strong man, armed, rode his charger right into the Church of God and strove to add the Popes of Rome to the number of patriarchs whom he raised, deposed, blinded, and executed as he pleased. He made them ecumenical and trod upon them when so made, with the heel of the imperial buskin. And now we come from the first oppression in confirming the Pope, and the second in reducing him to a captive vassal, to the third of subjecting him as the chief teacher of the Church to the lay power of the emperor.

As we look back we see the whole mind of Justinian photographed in his imperial legislation. When he had to speak to the bishop of his capital his language ran: “To the most holy and blessed Archbishop of this Imperial City, and Ecumenical Patriarch” – the core of the title was “Bishop of this Imperial City,” its corollary “Ecumenical Patriarch”. To him the bishops of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem were to submit any appeal from the provinces subject to them. Rome was not to be deposed from the prior rank acknowledged once for all by the eastern monarch and episcopate at the termination of the Acacian schism, in which act Justinian himself, as the ruling nephew, had taken notable part: but there was to be at Constantinople a similar patriarch, whom the whole eastern world should obey. From him the eastern bishops were to learn the mind of the emperor, just as, when they attended the court, he introduced them to the imperial presence. The emperor would honour him by using him as his chief ecclesiastical minister, who held the portfolio of doctrine. The laws which all the world was to receive bore this exaltation of the imperial bishop in their bosom. And it must be confessed that in St. Gregory's time the patriarchal title which Pope Gelasius had utterly refused to the Byzantine bishop a century before, had been conceded to him in St. Gregory's practice: the patriarchal title, but not the ecumenical. Of the patriarchs, when speaking of a fault to be condoned, he wrote, “if any of the four patriarchs had done this we could not pass it over,” and Constantinople must be added to Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem to make up this number of four: but of the assumed title of ecumenical, he wrote that it was diabolical, and the forerunner of anti-Christ.

But another part of Justinian's conduct is no less salient. He is not the first, indeed, but he is the chief of the theologising emperors. The disastrous assumption of dictating doctrine, and deciding in theological controversies, which, at the moment of the fall of the western empire, the insurgent Basiliscus had begun during his short-lived reign, and Zeno continued, and Anastasius reinforced, was taken up with far greater force by Justinian. He laboured during eight years just at the middle of the sixth century to exhibit Pope Vigilius at Constantinople as the first of his five patriarchs: he made the bishop of his capital hold a General Council without the Pope: he imposed his own doctrinal lucubrations upon that Council. He raised in the minds of the western bishops suspicions and fears as to Pope Vigilius being forced to become his instrument. The patriarch Epiphanius, who had weakly yielded to him, he afterwards deposed. Pope Vigilius escaped at last to die at Syracuse on his return to Rome worn out with the “contradiction of sinners” which he had experienced. In his person St. Peter had been a captive; seeds of schism and distrust had been scattered by Justinian in the West: which it required all the wisdom, the energy, and the patience of the great St. Gregory a generation later to overcome and root out. The following theologising emperors, Heraclius, Constans II., Justinian II., the poor phantom Philippicus Bardanes, and lastly Leo III., were only completing and crowning Justinian's double work, of making an ecumenical patriarch, and an emperor behind him, the ultimate judge of doctrine.

But had Leo III. succeeded in his attempt to grasp spiritual and temporal power in one hand, the Church of God would have come to an end. The whole future of the world was touched by the issue of this conflict.

It is to be remarked how immovable the Popes were, not only in the maintenance of Christian doctrine pure and proper, but likewise in the maintenance of that relation between the Two Powers which Christian doctrine requires as one of the conditions of its own action in the world. What on this subject Pope Gelasius in the last decade of the fifth century had said to the emperor Anastasius, now after two hundred and thirty years Pope St. Gregory II. was saying to the Iconoclast emperor Leo. In the interval Italy had been governed by the Byzantines, so far as they possessed it, during two centuries as a subject province, the captive of its spear; Rome had lived through it only in virtue of the Pope's primacy. The eastern empire having been false to the faith in its emperors and in many of its bishops, but especially in four successive patriarchs of Constantinople, had been cut in two, and one half of it given over to an anti-Christian religion to rule with unrestricted violence. And now the diminished emperor, who had just saved his capital from the Mohammedan chalif, had been seduced by Jewish and Mohammedan principles to sweep the Christian churches in his remaining dominion, from Sancta Sophia to the least country church, free of Christian symbols, beginning with the most sacred image of the Redeemer which adorned the gate of his own palace as the witness for the need of the oppressed. Then St. Gregory II. stood up against Leo III. exactly as his predecessor, Pope Gelasius, had resisted the emperor of the former day. Syria and Egypt and North Africa, and, still greater shame and peril, Spain had become Mohammedan. The Pope stood, in 727, where he had stood in 495. In the interval all these countries had fallen: but St. Gregory II. could tell a furious tyrant that all the nations of the West looked to St. Peter as “a god upon earth” – that he could not execute his threat to pull down the statue of St. Peter, which the Christians of that day reverenced in his basilica at Rome, which the Christians of eleven centuries have reverenced since in the same place, and put their head under the Apostle's foot as the acknowledgment of the dignity with which Christ invested him.

St. Gregory II. told Leo, the Isaurian, that his own imperial dignity was itself of divine institution, as the organ of human government: while the ecclesiastical dignity was of divine institution, in virtue of that divine intervention by which alone men become sons of God. The answer of the tyrant was five times to attempt the Pope's life, as that of a rebellious vassal whom he was entitled to put under ban, and efface as a natura ferina. But the issue of this contest was that three Popes, St. Gregory II., St. Gregory III., St. Zacharias, equally great, wise, and prudent, maintained intact their Primacy: that their successor, Stephen II., was the first Pope who crossed the Alps; that he consecrated the Carlovingian dynasty, and was accepted in Rome triumphantly as her king. In this series of acts he had also broken the chains of Italy, and a Pope presently following, who had ceased to be an eastern vassal, was to create a counterpoise to the chalif of Mohammed in an emperor, not Byzantine, but Roman, not grasping illicit power in the spirit of Saracenic pride, but as a type of Christian monarchy placed at the head of lawful government, not a perversion of Constantine and Theodosius, but the loyal spirit of both embodied by a divine consecration.

During the reigns of Leo III. and his son, Constantine Kopronymus, and the times of the Popes Gregory II., Gregory III., Zacharias, and Stephen II., certain events take place in the East and the West respectively, which, by their striking contrast with each other, while they coincide in the time of their happening, remarkably express and sum up the course taken by the three centuries which we are considering. Despotism matures in the East, and barbaric savagery triumphs: freedom, order, the majesty of nations growing into one faith, dawn upon the West.

In 727 the yet existing letters of Pope Gregory II. to the emperor Leo exhibit that monarch as thoroughly possessed with the claim to govern the Church as he governs the State. In this he is as thoroughly encountered by the Pope, who calls up against him the unbroken tradition of the Church during the seven centuries, and reminds him of the sad misfortunes of those emperors who had attempted to carry their civil authority into the domain of revealed truth. The great eastern teacher, St. John of Damascus, then living in the Syrian court of the chalif, lays this down in language as peremptory as that of the Pope. The guilt of Leo III. is heightened by the fact that he had before him in the history of his own realm during the hundred years preceding him the rise of a religion essentially opposed to the Christian faith, which he was professing himself to purify. Its force, ever exercised against Christians with the utmost virulence and cruelty, was centered in the fact that its chief deduced all civil authority from the prophetic office of its founder. But while the kingship of Mohammed, as inherited by his chalifs, began with his attempt to found a religion, Leo, in continuing and advancing to their utmost tension the interferences of Justinian with the spiritual order, was undoing the ancient laws of the empire for a hundred and fifty years, from the time of Constantine to that of Zeno. His own patriarch, Germanus, chose rather to lay his omophorion on the altar, and depart into exile than sanction and accept Leo's usurpation in sacred things. The whole liberty, and with it the whole existence of the Church, were comprehended in the resistance maintained by Pope Gregory, and attested by patriarch Germanus as a victim. Gregory II. followed, in giving to Cæsar the things of Cæsar, but to God the things of God, the whole line of his predecessors. Leo III. imitated wrongly the chief antagonist of the Christian name; but Mohammed was at least consistent with his original falsehood. In this his religion itself was contained. Likewise the whole work of Christendom was embodied in the victorious defence of Gregory against the consummation of eastern despotism.

The acts which followed by Pope and by emperor agreed with their several principles. Gregory III. on his accession at once endeavoured to bring the emperor to a better mind. But Leo had already deposed Germanus, and put Anastasius, a docile instrument, in his stead. The Pope called a council at Rome, which entirely supported the freedom of the Church. Leo turned to brute force. He sent out a great fleet with the commission to destroy his own metropolis, Ravenna, then to advance upon Rome, seize the Pope, and carry him away captive, as eighty years before St. Martin had been taken. Five years after this violent act of despotism, which the winds and seas had frustrated, Pope Gregory III., pressed hard by the advancing arms of the Lombard king, Liutprand, besought the great conqueror, Charles Martell, to take up his defence. He appealed to the piety of the Frank leader in behalf of St. Peter, a piety extinct in the Roman emperor's breast. Two years later Pipin had succeeded to the power of Charles Martell, and intimated in the strongest manner the veneration for the Apostolic See felt by the Frank people, in asking Pope Zacharias to pronounce as Pope that Pipin might duly be elected king of the Franks. Zacharias gave his decision: and the diet of the kingdom at Soissons bore out to the full the sentence of Pope Gregory II. in his letter to Leo III., that all the nations of the West looked to St. Peter as a god upon earth. Pipin became king of the Franks by the diet of the Franks accepting the decision of Pope Zacharias in 752, when in 733 the rough Isaurian soldier thought only of subduing the predecessor of Zacharias, Gregory III., by a dungeon in Byzantium after the mode of Constans II. with St. Martin. But even yet the contrast is not complete.

Not only had Leo III., in his wrath at being foiled by the elements, confiscated the patrimonies of the Church in the southern provinces of Italy which he possessed, and in Sicily, and in his realm generally, but he interfered with the immemorial spiritual jurisdiction of the Pope as patriarch, and assigned to his own patriarch at Constantinople the privileges which by the appointment of St. Leo had been given to the great metropolis, Thessalonica. This jurisdiction the patriarchs of Constantinople had coveted for centuries. Theodosius II. had tried to give it them by an imperial decree: but it was rescinded. Anastasius, who had been substituted for Germanus in 730, received the ill-omened gift in 733. The giver's son, Kopronymus, afterwards punished by blindness this unhappy man, but sent him back thus blinded to occupy his see during ten years; made him crown his son, and only in 753 Anastasius, becoming once more a servile persecutor of images, terminated the episcopate which he had so ingloriously received in 730. On the other hand, Pope Stephen II., successor of Zacharias, in spite of bodily weakness and continual danger, crossed the Alps, crowned Pipin, his wife and his sons, in the Abbey of St. Denys, in 754, and so consecrated the Carlovingian race. The rising monarchy of the Franks exulted in that very dignity of St. Peter's successor, which the Byzantine monarch was striving to subject to his own will.

But this contrast had a yet further and even more striking issue. Pope Stephen II., hard pressed by the resolute attempt of king Aistulf to make himself temporal king of Rome, applied for defence to the man he still recognised as sovereign, Constantine Kopronymus, and received for answer only the words that he might get it where he could. He beheld the Lombard destroying and trampling on every thing outside the walls of Rome. In the utmost bodily weakness he had taken the road to Pavia: he resisted every effort of Aistulf to detain him. He had been received by Pipin with joy and admiration. Protection against the Lombards was promised him. The Lombard king gave way to his fear of the Frankish kings, but presently broke through every engagement. On 1st January, 756, he had promised himself Rome, and all which it contained. By the end of the year he had surrendered the exarchate to St. Peter, and Rome had accepted her Pontiff Stephen as her king. And the name of Stephen II. is numbered with that of his three predecessors as the maker of pontifical liberty. Kopronymus ventured to ask Pipin to restore to him the cities which Pipin had conquered. He received for reply that not for earthly reward or wealth, but for the love of St. Peter, the king of the Franks had bestowed on the Pope, his successor, the cities which he had delivered from the Lombard, and restored Rome to him by delivering it from Lombard aggression.

Constantine Kopronymus had succeeded his father Leo III. in 740. An insurrection arose against him in his own house. It was put down with terrible severity. These were his doings in Constantinople in the same year 754, when Pipin was crowned by the Pope. He had surpassed his father in the cruelty with which he attempted to alter the existing worship of the Church. He had obtained some advantage in war against the Saracens, who were divided by the contest between the Ommaiads and the Abbassides, but he thought not the least of saving Italy from the Lombards, much more he desired to deliver the churches from the sacred images. For this purpose he caused many assemblies to be held and addressed the people, moving them to destroy the images. At last he held a Council at Constantinople of 338 bishops. At their head stood Gregory, bishop of Neocesarea, Theodosius, archbishop of Ephesus, a son of the emperor Apsimar, Sisinnius, bishop of Perge in Pamphylia. There was no patriarch, no representative from the sees of Rome, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem. The see of Constantinople was vacant, as Anastasius had just died. The Council met on the Asiatic side, opposite Constantinople, on the 10th February, 754, and sat six months. Then on the 8th August it passed over to the Church of Blachernæ. There the emperor presented himself at the ambon holding by the hand the monk Constantine, bishop of Sylæum, and cried with a loud voice, “Many years to the ecumenical patriarch Constantine.” At the same time he invested him with the patriarchal robes and the pallium. The Council ended that day, and nothing of it remains to us except a so-called confession of faith in the acts of the Seventh Ecumenical Council, the second of Nicæa, in 787, where it was refuted and rejected.

The Council of 787, called in the time of another Constantine, the grandson of Kopronymus, when the eastern emperor had returned for the moment to the orthodox faith, has denounced this Council of 754 as claiming most unlawfully the title of ecumenical. Being confirmed by Pope Adrian I., it enjoys that title itself, and its utter condemnation of the Council of 338 bishops which met at the request of Kopronymus can be trusted. Here it is sufficient to say that this Council of 754 covered Kopronymus and his little son Leo with acclamations for having destroyed idolatry. When the emperor and the new patriarch Constantine and the rest of the bishops appeared in the square at Constantinople they published the decree of the Council, and renewed their anathemas against the patriarch Germanus and St. John Damascene. When the decree reached the provinces, Catholics were everywhere dismayed; the Iconoclasts began to sell the holy vessels and disorganise the churches. The images were burnt, the pictures torn down or whitewashed; only landscapes and the figures of birds and beasts were retained, especially pictures of theatres, hunts, and races. To bow before the images of Christ and of the saints was forbidden; to bow before the emperor was retained, and any insult to his figure upon a coin punished with death.

In 754, Kopronymus, holding Constantine by the hand, presented him to the assembled bishops as his own choice for ecumenical patriarch. Not only was the individual his choice, but his father, Leo, twenty years before, had made the office by constituting the spiritual jurisdiction of the bishops of the capital conterminous with the empire, in that he deprived the Pope in his quality of the first patriarch of the ten provinces which from the beginning had acknowledged his patriarchal superintendence.

We may follow to his end the ecumenical patriarch who had this beginning.

It seems that neither a bishop nor a secular priest in the eastern empire ventured to oppose the decree of this Council. But monks suffered the most fearful persecution. They were driven away and their monasteries destroyed. Nor were these the worst blows which the emperor dealt upon their institution. He invented truly devilish means to make them contemptible and abhorred. Some who had been banished from Constantinople yielded to his will, subscribed the edict against images, quitted their dress and married. Thereupon they returned to the city, recovered all their civil rights, were marked with favour, received the emperor's personal attention. But those who remained true to their faith and their habit experienced his utmost severity. A month after his return from the war, the 24th August, 766, on which day he had appointed a chariot-race, he caused the monks in the neighbourhood of Constantinople to be brought together into the racecourse. There, as the rows of seats were crowded with people, he compelled each monk to pass in procession with a woman of bad life beside him. Thus they suffered every indignity which an excited populace could put upon them. The bad courtiers saw that it was an evil stroke of the emperor. Those who had not the secret thought that they had been taken in company with these women.

This spectacle so pleased the emperor that, four days afterwards, he repeated it with nineteen of his chief officers, whom he charged with a conspiracy against him. The real offence was the maintenance of the right belief, the having had relation with the banished Stephen in his exile at Proconnesus, and more than once to have praised his constancy in suffering. He caused them to be led round the racecourse, and made the crowd spit on them and revile them. The two of highest account were beheaded: two patricians, brothers, Constantine, who had been controller-general of the posts, and Strategius, officer in the life guards; the rest were blinded and banished to an island, nor did Kopronymus forget every year that he lived to send thither executioners to inflict on each a hundred strokes of oxhide. When he found that the people grieved over the execution of Constantine and Strategius, had not forborne tears, and even murmured, he put down this to the fault of the prefect Procopius, who ought to have suppressed these seditious cries; he had him scourged and deprived.

The patriarch Constantine had received from the emperor extraordinary and unfitting honours. They were followed by public disgrace. The emperor learnt that he had had intercourse with one of the accused for conspiracy. He put up witnesses who declared that they had heard expressions from him against the emperor. This the patriarch absolutely denied, and proof was not forthcoming. The emperor caused them secretly to confirm their statement by an oath taken on the holy Cross. Thereupon, without further proof he set seals upon the door of the patriarchal palace, and banished the patriarch to Prince's Island. Constantine was thus deposed on the 30th August, 766, and on the 16th November the emperor, without regarding any canonical form, named Nicetas to his place. The new patriarch was yet more unfitted for so eminent a rank, being a eunuch and slave by birth. From his youth he had only been accustomed to attend on women, had scarcely learnt to read; but the emperor, on recommendation of certain ladies of the court, had caused him to be made a priest and given him a post in the Church of the Apostles. Upon entering the patriarchal palace Nicetas showed himself worthy of the imperial choice, for he caused the magnificent mosaics on the walls to be destroyed. These his two predecessors had spared for their beauty.

By similar services the highest dignitaries of the kingdom were obtained. A zealous Iconoclast was in the eyes of the emperor qualified for every civil or military post. Thus Michael of Melissene, brother of the empress Eudocia, was made governor of Phrygia, Lachanodracon of Asia, and Manes of Galatia. At the beginning of 767 Constantine sent these new and yet more severe governors into the provinces, having just before imposed an oath on all his subjects not to honour images. Then began a general persecution of the orthodox. Those governors showed themselves in the provinces obedient instruments of their emperor's rage. They profaned churches, persecuted monks, and destroyed pictures. They tore relics of the saints from their sanctuaries, and cast them into rivers or drains. They mixed them with bones of animals, and burnt them together, so that the ashes might not be distinguished. The relics of the martyr St. Euphemia, in whose church at Chalcedon the great Council had been held, were its chief treasure. The emperor had the shrine cast into the sea, changed part of the church into an arsenal, and made the other part a place where all the rubbish of the city might be shot. The waves carried the shrine to the Isle of Lemnos, whose inhabitants fished it up. Twenty years after the death of Kopronymus, Irene, then reigning with her son Constantine, caused this treasure to be brought back to Chalcedon, the church to be purified and restored to its former condition.

The deposed patriarch Constantine had endured the hardest treatment at Prince's Island during thirteen months. The emperor had learnt that this unhappy prelate had told to others an impious remark concerning the Mother of God, which the emperor had made, and enjoined silence about it. Furious in his wrath he ordered him to be brought to Constantinople; he had him beaten till he could not stand, and had him carried in a litter to Sancta Sophia to be degraded. He was cast down on the steps of the sanctuary. A court-secretary read in presence of the whole assembly, called together by the emperors order, a detailed accusation with loud voice, and as he read each detail struck him with it in the face. In the meantime Nicetas had mounted the patriarchal chair, and presided over each insult which his benefactor suffered. When the reading was finished, Nicetas took the act of accusation, had Constantine carried to the tribune, where he was held upright by several, that the people might see him, made one of his suffragans go up to pronounce the anathema, to take off the episcopal robes, and with insulting expressions to expel him from the church, from which he had to go backwards.

The next day, a day of games in the circus, his beard, eye-brows, and hair were torn out; he was dressed in a short woollen smock without sleeves, put backwards on an ass, and led through the circus by a nephew whose nose had been cut off. The parties of the circus reviled him and spat on him. At the end of the circus he was thrown down, trodden under foot, and put upon the stone which terminated the circus to be exposed there, so long as the games lasted, to the jeers of the riders as they passed. He was then thrown into prison, where he lay almost forgotten to the 15th August of the following year, 768. That day was the last of his sufferings. The emperor sent two patricians to him to ask what he thought of the emperor's belief and the doctrine of the council. The sufferer, to the last a courtier, thought by a submissive answer to alleviate his punishment. He replied: “The emperor's belief is holy, and the council has issued a holy confession”. The patricians said at once: “That is just the admission which we wished to have from thy godless mouth. Nothing more remains for thee but death.” They then pronounced his condemnation, and led him into the amphitheatre, where his head was struck off. It was fastened by the ears to the mile-stone, where it served the mob three days for a spectacle. The body was dragged to the Pelagium, a spot where the church of St. Pelagia had stood, which the emperor had pulled down, to make a court where the bodies of the condemned were thrown after execution; in the same way as on the other side the water he had pulled down St. Andrew's church to make a place of execution. The body was also said to have been dissected for the good of science. This was the reward which the patriarch received for having sacrificed his faith and conscience in giving sanction to his master's impieties.

This degradation by Kopronymus of the man whom he had made and called ecumenical patriarch, and to make him had persisted in his father's overthrow of the Church's order from the beginning, by an act of despotic power breaking into her constitution, is it not also a token of the condition into which the most ruthless tyranny had reduced the episcopate of that eastern realm? Those bishops who, at the bidding of an adventurer, successful for the moment and presently swept away, had met at Constantinople in 710 to overthrow the Sixth Council and the faith of the Church; and again, the three hundred and thirty-eight who had met at the same place at the bidding of Kopronymus to make the whole order of divine worship subject to his will, did the spirit of St. Basil, St. Athanasius, St. Chrysostom, St. Cyril of Alexandria live in them still, or were they in possession indeed of unquestioned episcopal rank and all the powers which belong to consecration, but in fact the most abject minions of the most debased human will – the will of a Byzantine despot? The will of one fined already of one half his empire by the divine Hand which raised up the most abject of savages to punish a debased Christian realm. Yet ruler after ruler had not received the lesson which faith derives from chastisement. Leo III. surpassed his predecessors, and his son surpassed the father, in imitating the arrogance of a false theocracy. He carried his civil autocracy into interference with the doctrine and the worship of the Church. This interference the laws of his own empire warned him against, as cited by St. Gregory II. in the examples of the greatest emperors.

It is not too much to say that the despotism wielded by those who occupied the Byzantine throne from Justinian to Kopronymus had eaten out the courage and dulled the sense of divine things which we admire in the Fathers of the fourth century. Athanasius denounced a Constantius, and Basil a Valens, but the eastern bishops of the eighth century crouched before Leo and Kopronymus, and if there had not been a succession of Popes, in whom the spirit of St. Leo lived on, and the doctrine of St. Leo was maintained, the Church herself would have yielded to the most debasing despotism ever seen. But it must not be forgotten that the bishops of the West were faithful to the teaching and emulated the stedfastness of the Popes. A despotic patriarch, nominee and instrument of a despotic emperor, made a servile episcopate. A martyr Pope, such as St. Martin, likewise made an army of martyrs. The several character of bishops in the East and West completes the contrast which we have been drawing out.

In the patriarch Constantine the ecumenical patriarchate received its completed form. Kopronymus chose him; took him by the hand, presented him to the 338 bishops who held an illicit and heretical council at his bidding; having used him for his purposes, deposed, beheaded him, treated his lifeless body with extreme dishonour.

In the same Kopronymus, the two hundred years of secular lordship begun by Justinian's conquest of Rome came to an end. He had disregarded the appeal of Pope Stephen to defend his own dominion from the Lombards. Pipin had deprived them of that dominion, and then bestowed it upon St. Peter. Kopronymus asked Pipin to give it back to him. Pipin refused, and after thirty-four successive Popes had endured a dominion which began with the deposition of St. Silverius by a shameless woman, and perhaps cannot show a single act of generous defence in return for loyal service during two centuries, the attempt inaugurated by Justinian, and finished by Kopronymus, to reduce the successor of St. Peter to a patriarch whom they might treat as the patriarch Constantine was treated, failed finally and for ever. Stephen II., an infirm old man who had crossed the Alps at the risk of his life, deserted by Kopronymus and threatened by Aistulf, sat at the grave of the chief Apostle, Prince as well as Bishop of Rome, and the Christian faith was not left to be determined by soldiers of fortune on the throne of Byzantium, but saved by and for the guardianship of the living Peter.

From Metrophanes, the first recorded bishop of Byzantium, not yet Constantinople, in the time of the Nicene Council to Methodius, in the year 842, when the Iconoclast contest came to a final end, fifty-eight bishops sat on the chair of the Greek capital. The first was simple bishop of a suffragan city to the Thracian metropolis of Heraclea. As soon as Constantine in the year 330 had consecrated his new capital as Nova Roma, there began a continual exaltation, the work of the eastern emperors for their own purposes; after four centuries the bishops of Constantinople had in 733 reached the culmination of their hopes by receiving from the emperor Leo III. ten provinces out of the Roman jurisdiction, and twenty bishoprics of his own birth-land, Isauria, previously belonging to the patriarch of Antioch. They were in a Greek sense ecumenical, not because their authority extended over the world, but because by imperial gift it had become conterminous with that portion of the world which was considered by the Greek emperor the habitation of men, that is, his subjects. The original and true patriarchates of Alexandria and Antioch had fallen under Mohammedan domination. So likewise had Jerusalem, which attained patriarchal rank only in the middle of the fifth century. The name of each as patriarch was carefully maintained, especially for appearance in the list of Greek councils, but in each case, and for hundreds of years, it was little more than “magni nominis umbra”. Of the fifty-eight bishops of the capital many have gained for themselves imperishable honour, many are venerated in the number of the saints by Greeks and Latins, and looked up to as intercessors and protectors, others have at least left behind them in one or other respect a distinguished memory. But more than a third, one and twenty, are branded as heretics or favourers of heresy. Almost as many were for various reasons deposed, partly by heretical, partly by orthodox emperors. Several, also, of them received at the same time dishonouring treatment, such as Kallinikus, Anastasius, and Constantine. In three cases, those of St. Chrysostom, Eutychius, and Pyrrhus, deposed prelates, were restored, a case which much oftener recurs in later Byzantine history.

In the fourth century the names of Eusebius, Macedonius, Eudoxius, and Demophilus in the see of the capital are marked as supporters of the Arian heresy. In the fifth century the Nestorian heresy springs from its author in the very chair of Constantinople. Fifty years later the Acacian schism springs in like manner from the ambition of its author in the same chair, and the names of four successors, Fravitas, Euphemius, Macedonius II, and Timotheus are struck from the diptychs of their own church, when the schism was terminated under Pope Hormisdas. In less than twenty years after this, Anthimus, put into the see of the capital by the intrigues of the same empress Theodora who violently deposed Pope St. Silverius, was deposed by Pope Agapetus in his visit to Constantinople, as a Monophysite heretic. In the sixth century the Monothelite heresy was owing mainly to the political intrigues of Sergius, sitting for twenty-eight years in the see of Constantinople, also the prime minister and guide of the emperor Heraclius; he and his three successors, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, were the main-stay of that most insidious and stubborn heresy, which for forty continuous years kept the Church in peril, and strove to overthrow the efforts of ten Popes to maintain the faith, and brought one of them to die a martyr under the rule of Constans II. But in the seventh and eighth centuries, the most terrible Iconoclast persecution found in six bishops of Constantinople its main support, in that they put to the service of the emperors Leo III. and Constantine Kopronymus, Leo V. and Theophilus, these immense ecclesiastical powers with which the emperors themselves had invested them over the eastern bishops. The single patriarch had himself become a despot in wielding the tyranny of the civil despot as his chief instrument. These six ecumenical patriarchs wielded their authority under Iconoclast emperors for a long time: Anastasius I. from 730 to 753; Constantine II. from 754 to 766; Nicetas I. from 766 to 780; then an orthodox sovereign brought with him an orthodox council. The patriarch Tarasius and union with the West might seem to have secured a deliverance from a renewed reign of the Iconoclast violence. On the contrary, three succeeding patriarchs, Theodotus from 815 to 821; Antonius I. from 821 to 832, and John VII. from 832 to 841, did what they could to carry out the wishes of their masters for that heresy.

Such was the conduct, as guardian of the faith, of the line of pseudo-popes set up by state policy at Constantinople, in virtue of the pretension that the bishop of Nova Roma should enjoy equal rights with the bishop of Old Rome.

It is to be noted that in this period the whole doctrine concerning the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ went through the most complete sifting and discussion in the Councils of the Church. During it, from St. Silvester to Gregory IV., seventy pontiffs sat in the chair of Peter. They lived in full five hundred years of perpetual struggle. One after another “apparent diræ facies inimicaque Troiæ numina” – Arius in the foreground heralding Mohammed in the rear; Nestorius and Eutyches tearing the unity of the Church on opposite sides; an able bishop of Constantinople seizing the moment of Rome's temporal captivity under Arian strangers to raise his see to parity: the East well nigh devoured by opposing sects. After this, an insidious Byzantine couple, Heraclius and Sergius, emperor and patriarch, covering up deep wounds with ambiguous words, and sacrificing the empire by their sacrifice of the faith; and lastly, emperors who disregard things human and divine, and mark their mastery over doctrine by the subversion of worship, a Leo III. and a Constantine Kopronymus. All secular power is in the hands of Nova Roma which Constantine has set up to be the Christian city from its cradle: the seven greater hills to take the place of the hills by the Tiber, and in these very hills of Constantine from age to age the evil vision nestles – his successor and his patriarch are the chief performers in this ever recruited drama of heresy. But through all these attacks the seventy successors on St. Peter's throne have kept the doctrine of the Church, that is the doctrine of the Incarnation itself, one and unchanged. The infidel has trampled upon Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem; but while the old Christendom has sunk from debased nations into Saracen serfdom, a new Christendom has arisen among Teuton settlers, making their first steps in national life. Nova Roma has been false to the purpose for which Constantine founded it; and Old Rome has found among those whom the rival counts as barbarians, one more faithful as well as more powerful than she has been. Charlemagne stands at the end of the vista which Constantine begins. Of the two, does he not merit most in the Church of God?

But to estimate at its due value this long series of historic facts, it must be remembered that during at least three centuries of this period, the seventy Popes work as captives, the fifty-eight bishops of Constantinople work as the right hand of emperors. From the time indeed when St. Silvester passed from the catacombs to the Lateran palace, to the time when the Vandal robbers desolated Rome under the eyes of St. Leo, the Popes were not captives. They had severe persecution at times to undergo: especially under Constantius I., the whole fifty years of Arian trial were a special test of their fortitude, their clear undoubted maintenance of the Godhead of our Lord, their unfaltering trust in their apostolic right. But so long as there was a Christian western emperor he had a regard to the Apostolic See of the West: even a Valentinian III. could acknowledge St. Leo in an imperial edict in 447 as “Principem episcopalis coronæ”; words which present the very idea of St Peter's majesty, as the root, the bond, and the crown of the episcopate. But with the inroad of barbarians, as soldiers of fortune and civil masters of Rome, another time begins. And when to barbarous manners and brute force was added the Arian spirit, a period ensued which was calculated to test to the utmost the dowry of truth bestowed on the Apostolic See. Justinian as a civil ruler may be deemed worse than Odoacer, worse even than Theodorich. What the Popes did, they did often after being nominated without free election, often with the postponement of their confirmation after election (as when after the death of Pope Honorius, Pope Severinus had his three years diminished to two months, in the hope of Heraclius to bend him to the Monothelite heresy), sometimes with unjust depositions, as St. Silverius by Theodora, as St. Martin by Constans II., as St. Sergius attempted by Justinian II., as John VI. attempted by Apsimar, the emperor of a day: again by unlawful substitution for a living Pope, as Eugenius to St. Martin, when condemned but not yet martyred. Then again the eleven years preceding the great Pope Sergius from 676 to 687 witness the appointment of six Popes. At this time there is a series of Popes who show eastern lineage, as if the emperor's hand were busy in the choice of them. But no one of them fails, and St. Sergius and St. Gregory III., both easterns, are of the very greatest and most stedfast in the whole time of Popes.

Add to this that the civil condition of these Popes, from the entrance of the Lombards to the end of the exarchs, was often most perilous. It was plaintively alluded to by St. Agatho in addressing the Sixth Council, when forty years after the death of Honorius he set forth in most absolute language the unfaltering integrity of faith which had marked the Apostolic See to his own time, language; which the Council accepted.

It is to be noted that a Pope, whose election had been long delayed by the mere arbitrary will of emperor or exarch, as soon as he was consecrated, entered into the full possession of his unrestricted rights. The exarch who had power to delay, who had power to plunder the Lateran treasury of the Church, as Isaac and John Platina did, had no power to lessen the dignity of St. Peter's succession when once acknowledged. Even Vigilius is admitted to have emancipated himself from the thraldom of Theodora; and Eugenius, forced upon the Romans by the tyranny of Constans II., was a blameless Pope, who did not yield to the heresy of Constans.

What manner of men were they who were loyal vassals to the most iniquitous rulers, and when solicited by their own faithful peoples to break an abhorred yoke yet held them back, and adhered to those who gave them neither protection nor justice? They did not rule as Satraps in a kingdom worn down to prostration by centuries of arbitrary power, but were acknowledged as sitting in the apostolic throne of Faith and Justice by rough lords from the North, to whom obedience in spiritual things was a Christian virtue learned with great difficulty by those who inherited a natural independence. Interminable intestine quarrels among the western potentates, who yet accept the voice of an unarmed Pope as the interpreter of faith, and the most upright arbiter of human justice, are a proof the more how deeply the rule of St. Peter had sunk into the western mind.

What guarantee of truth can be offered by the course of human things if this be not one? That is the testimony of the three centuries from Genseric the Vandal to Aistulf the Lombard. The testimony of Teuton conquerors, who burn what they once worshipped, and worship what they once burnt, who enter on their dominion as spoilers and develop into Christian monarchs. The testimony of Constantine's imperial successors, who own the papal succession to St. Peter, while they try to bend it to their will, and in the attempt subject half their empire to an anti-Christian tyranny. Lastly, the testimony of St. Leo the Great and fifty-one successors to the time when St. Leo III., invested with civil sovereignty, employed the acknowledged greatness of his spiritual power to restore the empire which the first Leo saw sinking in ruins.