Section 3. The Church of the Fifth and Sixth Centuries

1. The Arians of the Gothic Race

 2. The Nestorians 3. The Monophysites

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 The patronage extended by the first Christian Emperors to Arianism, its adoption by the barbarians who succeeded to their power, the subsequent expulsion of all heresy beyond the limits of the Empire, and then again the Monophysite tendencies of Egypt and part of Syria, changed in some measure the aspect of the Church, and claim our further attention. It was still a body in possession, or approximating to the possession, of the orbis  terrarum ; but it was not simply intermixed with sectaries, as we have been surveying it in the earlier periods, rather it lay between or over against large schisms. That same vast Association, which, and which only, had existed from the first, which had been identified by all parties with Christianity, which had been ever called Catholic by people and by laws, took a different shape; collected itself in far greater strength on some points of her extended territory than on others; possessed whole kingdoms with scarcely a rival; lost others partially or wholly, temporarily or for good; was stemmed in its course here or there by external obstacles; and was defied by heresy, in a substantive shape and in mass, from foreign lands, and with the support of the temporal power. Thus not to mention the Arianism of the Eastern Empire in the fourth century, the whole of the West was possessed by the same heresy in the fifth; and nearly the whole of Asia, east of the Euphrates, as far as it was Christian, by the Nestorians, in the centuries which followed; while the Monophysites had almost the possession of Egypt, and at times of the whole Eastern Church. I think it no assumption to call Arianism, Nestorianism, and Eutychianism heresies, or to identify the contemporary Catholic Church with Christianity. Now, then, let us consider the mutual relation of Christianity and heresy under these circumstances. § 1. The Arians of the Gothic Race

 No heresy has started with greater violence or more sudden success than the Arian; and it presents a still more remarkable exhibition of these characteristics among the barbarians than in the civilized world. Even among the Greeks it had shown a missionary spirit. Theophilus in the reign of Constantius had introduced the dominant heresy, not without some promising results, to the Sabeans of the Arabian peninsula; but under Valens, Ulphilas became the apostle of a whole race. He taught the Arian doctrine, which he had unhappily learned in the Imperial Court, first to the pastoral M S sogoths; who, unlike the other branches of their family, had multiplied under the M S sian mountains with neither military nor religious triumphs. The Visigoths were next corrupted; by whom does not appear. It is one of the singular traits in the history of this vast family of heathens that they so instinctively caught, and so impetuously communicated, and so fiercely maintained, a heresy, which had excited in the Empire, except at Constantinople, little interest in the body of the people. The Visigoths are said to have been converted by the influence of Valens; but Valens reigned for only fourteen years, and the barbarian population which had been admitted to the Empire amounted to nearly a million of persons. It is as difficult to trace how the heresy was conveyed from them to the other barbarian tribes. Gibbon seems to suppose that the Visigoths acted the part of missionaries in their career of predatory warfare from Thrace to the Pyrenees. But such is the fact, however it was brought about, that the success in arms and the conversion to Arianism, of Ostrogoths, Alani, Suevi, Vandals, and Burgundians stand as concurrent events in the history of the times; and by the end of the fifth century the heresy had been established by the Visigoths in France and Spain, in Portugal by the Suevi, in Africa by the Vandals, and by the Ostrogoths in Italy. For a while the title of Catholic as applied to the Church seemed a misnomer; for not only was she buried beneath these populations of heresy, but that heresy was one, and maintained the same distinctive tenet, whether at Carthage, Seville, Toulouse, or Ravenna.

 2.

 It cannot be supposed that these northern warriors had attained to any high degree of mental cultivation; but they understood their own religion enough to hate the Catholics, and their bishops were learned enough to hold disputations for its propagation. They professed to stand upon the faith of Ariminum, administering Baptism under an altered form of words, and re-baptizing Catholics whom they gained over to their sect. It must be added that, whatever was their cruelty or tyranny, both Goths and Vandals were a moral people, and put to shame the Catholics whom they dispossessed. "What can the prerogative of a religious name profit us," says Salvian, "that we call ourselves Catholic, boast of being the faithful, taunt Goths, and Vandals with the reproach of an heretical appellation, while we live in heretical wickedness?" [n. 1 ] The barbarians were chaste, temperate, just, and devout; the Visigoth Theodoric repaired every morning with his domestic officers to his chapel, where service was performed by the Arian priests; and one singular instance is on record of the defeat of a Visigoth force by the Imperial troops on a Sunday, when instead of preparing for battle they were engaged in the religious services of the day [n. 2 ]. Many of their princes were men of great ability, as the two Theodorics, Euric and Leovigild.

 3.

 Successful warriors, animated by a fanatical spirit of religion, were not likely to be content with a mere profession of their own creed; they proceeded to place their own priests in the religious establishments which they found, and to direct a bitter persecution against the vanquished Catholics. The savage cruelties of the Vandal Hunneric in Africa have often been enlarged upon; Spain was the scene of repeated persecutions; Sicily, too, had its Martyrs. Compared with these enormities, it was but a little thing to rob the Catholics of their churches, and the shrines of their treasures. Lands, immunities, and jurisdictions, which had been given by the Emperors to the African Church, were made over to the clergy of its conquerors; and by the time of Belisarius, the Catholic Bishops had been reduced to less than a third of their original number. In Spain, as in Africa, bishops were driven from their sees, churches were destroyed, cemeteries profaned, martyries rifled. When it was possible, the Catholics concealed the relics in caves, keeping up a perpetual memory of these provisional hiding-places [n. 3 ]. Repeated spoliations were exercised upon the property of the Church. Leovigild applied [n. 4 ] its treasures partly to increasing the splendour of his throne, partly to national works. At other times, the Arian clergy themselves must have been the recipients of the plunder: for when Childebert the Frank had been brought into Spain by the cruelties exercised against the Catholic Queen of the Goths, who was his sister, he carried away with him from the Arian churches, as St. Gregory of Tours informs us, sixty chalices, fifteen patens, twenty cases in which the gospels were kept, all of pure gold and ornamented with jewels [n. 5 ].

 4.

 In France, and especially in Italy, the rule of the heretical power was much less oppressive; Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, reigned from the Alps to Sicily, and till the close of a long reign he gave an ample toleration to his Catholic subjects. He respected their property, suffered their churches and sacred places to remain in their hands, and had about his court some of their eminent Bishops, since known as Saints, St. Cæsarius of Arles, and St. Epiphanius of Pavia. Still he brought into the country a new population, devoted to Arianism, or, as we now speak, a new Church. "His march," says Gibbon [n. 6 ], "must be considered as the emigration of an entire people; the wives and children of the Goths, their aged parents, and most precious effects, were carefully transported; and some idea may be formed of the heavy luggage that now followed the camp by the loss of two thousand waggons, which had been sustained in a single action in the war of Epirus." To his soldiers he assigned a third of the soil of Italy, and the barbarian families settled down with their slaves and cattle. The original number of the Vandal conquerors of Africa had only been fifty thousand men, but the military colonists of Italy soon amounted to the number of two hundred thousand; which, according to the calculation adopted by the same author elsewhere, involves a population of a million. The least that could be expected was, that an Arian ascendency established through the extent of Italy would provide for the sufficient celebration of the Arian worship, and we hear of the Arians having a Church even in Rome [n. 7 ]. The rule of the Lombards in the north of Italy succeeded to that of the Goths, Arians, like their predecessors, without their toleration. The clergy whom they brought with them seem to have claimed their share in the possession of the Catholic churches [n. 8 ]; and though the Court was converted at the end of thirty years, many cities in Italy were for some time afterwards troubled by the presence of heretical bishops [n. 9 ]. The rule of Arianism in France lasted for eighty years; in Spain for a hundred and eighty; in Africa for a hundred; for about a hundred in Italy. These periods were not contemporaneous; but extend altogether from the beginning of the fifth to the end of the sixth century.

 5.

 It will be anticipated that the duration of this ascendency of error had not the faintest tendency to deprive the ancient Church of the West of the title of Catholic; and it is needless to produce evidence of a fact which is on the very face of the history. The Arians seem never to have claimed the Catholic name. It is more remarkable that the Catholics during this period were denoted by the additional title of "Romans." Of this there are many proofs in the histories of St. Gregory of Tours, Victor of Vite, and the Spanish Councils. Thus, St. Gregory speaks of Theodegisilus, a king of Portugal, expressing his incredulity at a miracle, by saying, "It is the temper of the Romans, (for," interposes the author, "they call men of our religion Romans,) and not the power of God." [n. 10 ] "Heresy is everywhere an enemy to Catholics," says the same St. Gregory in a subsequent place, and he proceeds to illustrate it by the story of a "Catholic woman," who had a heretic husband, to whom, he says, came "a presbyter of our religion very Catholic;" and whom the husband matched at table with his own Arian presbyter, "that there might be the priests of each religion" in their house at once. When they were eating, the husband said to the Arian, "Let us have some sport with this presbyter of the Romans." [n. 11 ] The Arian Count Gomachar, seized on the lands of the Church of Agde in France, and was attacked with a fever; on his recovery, at the prayers of the Bishop, he repented of having asked for them, observing, "What will these Romans say now? that my fever came of taking their land." [n. 12 ] When the Vandal Theodoric would have killed the Catholic Armogastes, after failing to torture him into heresy, his presbyter dissuaded him, "lest the Romans should begin to call him a Martyr." [n. 13 ]

 6.

 This appellation had two meanings; one, which will readily suggest itself, is its use in contrast to the word "barbarian," as denoting the faith of the Empire, as "Greek" occurs in St. Paul's Epistles. In this sense it would more naturally be used by the Romans themselves than by others. Thus Salvian says, that "nearly all the Romans are greater sinners than the barbarians;" [n. 14 ] and he speaks of "Roman heretics, of which there is an innumerable multitude," [n. 15 ] meaning heretics within the Empire. And so St. Gregory the Great complains, that he "had become Bishop of the Lombards rather than of the Romans." [n. 16 ] And Evagrius, speaking even of the East, contrasts "Romans and barbarians " [n. 17 ] in his account of St. Simeon; and at a later date, and even to this day, Thrace and portions of Dacia and of Asia Minor derive their name from Rome. In like manner, we find Syrian writers sometimes speaking of the religion of the Romans, sometimes of the Greeks [n. 18 ], as synonyms.

 7.

 But the word certainly contains also an allusion to the faith and communion of the Roman See. In this sense the Emperor Theodosius, in his letter to Acacius of Ber S a, contrasts it with Nestorianism, which was within the Empire as well as Catholicism; during the controversy raised by that heresy, he exhorts him and others to show themselves "approved priests of the Roman religion." [n. 19 ] Again when the Ligurian nobles were persuading the Arian Ricimer to come to terms with Anthemius, the orthodox representative of the Greek Emperor [n. 20 ], they propose to him to send St. Epiphanius as ambassador, a man "whose life is venerable to every Catholic and Roman, and at least amiable in the eyes of a Greek ( Græculus ) if he deserves the sight of him." [n. 21 ] It must be recollected, too, that the Spanish and African Churches actually were in the closest union with the See of Rome at that time, and that that intercommunion was the visible ecclesiastical distinction between them and their Arian rivals. The chief ground of the Vandal Hunneric's persecution of the African Catholics seems to have been their connexion with their brethren beyond the sea [n. 22 ], which he looked at with jealousy, as introducing a foreign power into his territory. Prior to this he had published an edict calling on the "Homoüsian" Bishops (for on this occasion he did not call them Catholic), to meet his own bishops at Carthage and treat concerning the faith, that "their meetings to the seduction of Christian souls might not be held in the provinces of the Vandals." [n. 23 ] Upon this invitation, Eugenius of Carthage replied, that all the transmarine Bishops of the orthodox communion ought to be summoned, "in particular because it is a matter for the whole world, not special to the African provinces," that "they could not undertake a point of faith sine universitatis  assensu ." Hunneric answered that if Eugenius would make him sovereign of the orbis terrarum, he would comply with his request. This led Eugenius to say that the orthodox faith was "the only true faith;" that the king ought to write to his allies abroad, if he wished to know it, and that he himself would write to his brethren for foreign bishops, "who," he says, "may assist us in setting before you the true faith, common to them and to us, and especially the Roman Church, which is the head of all Churches." Moreover, the African Bishops in their banishment in Sardinia, to the number of sixty, with St. Fulgentius at their head, quote with approbation the words of Pope Hormisdas, to the effect that they hold, "on the point of free will and divine grace, what the Roman, that is, the Catholic, Church follows and preserves." [n. 24 ] Again, the Spanish Church was under the superintendence of the Pope's Vicar [n. 25 ] during the persecutions, whose duty it was to hinder all encroachments upon "the Apostolical decrees, or the limits of the Holy Fathers," through the whole of the country.

 8.

 Nor was the association of Catholicism with the See of Rome an introduction of that age. The Emperor Gratian, in the fourth century, had ordered that the Churches which the Arians had usurped should be restored (not to those who held "the Catholic faith," or "the Nicene Creed," or were "in communion with the orbis terrarum,") but "who chose the communion of Damasus," [n. 26 ] the then Pope. It was St. Jerome's rule, also, in some well-known passages: Writing against Ruffinus, who had spoken of "our faith," he says," What does he mean by 'his faith'? that which is the strength of the Roman Church? or that which is contained in the volumes of Origen? If he answer, 'The Roman,' then we are Catholics who have borrowed nothing of Origen's error; but if Origen's blasphemy be his faith, then, while he is charging me with inconsistency, he proves himself to be an heretic." [n. 27 ] The other passage, already quoted, is still more exactly to the point, because it was written on occasion of a schism. The divisions at Antioch had thrown the Catholic Church into a remarkable position; there were two Bishops in the See, one in connexion with the East, the other with Egypt and the West, with which then was "Catholic Communion"? St. Jerome has no doubt on the subject:  Writing to St. Damasus, he says, "Since the East tears into pieces the Lord's coat, and therefore by me is the chair of Peter to be consulted, and that faith which is praised by the Apostle's mouth ... Though your greatness terrifies me, yet your kindness invites me. From the Priest I ask the salvation of the victim, from the Shepherd the protection of the sheep. Let us speak without offence; I court not the Roman height: I speak with the successor of the Fisherman and the disciple of the Cross. I, who follow none as my chief but Christ, am associated in communion with thy blessedness, that is, with the See of Peter. On that rock the Church is built, I know. Whoso shall eat the Lamb outside that House is profane ... I know not Vitalis" (the Apollinarian), "Meletius I reject, I am ignorant of Paulinus. Whoso gathereth not with thee, scattereth; that is, he who is not of Christ is of Antichrist." [n. 28 ] Again, "The ancient authority of the monks, dwelling round about, rises against me; I meanwhile cry out, If any be joined to Peter's chair he is mine." [n. 29 ]

 9.

 Here was what may be considered a dignus vindice nodus, the Church being divided, and an arbiter wanted. Such a case had also occurred in Africa in the controversy with the Donatists. Four hundred bishops, though but in one region, were a fifth part of the whole Episcopate of Christendom, and might seem too many for a schism, and in themselves too large a body to be cut off from God's inheritance by a mere majority, even had it been overwhelming. St. Augustine, then, who so often appeals to the orbis terrarum, sometimes adopts a more prompt criterion. He tells certain Donatists to whom he writes, that the Catholic Bishop of Carthage "was able to make light of the thronging multitude of his enemies, when he found himself by letters of credence joined both to the Roman Church, in which ever had flourished the principality of the Apostolical See, and to the other lands whence the gospel came to Africa itself." [n. 30 ]

 There are good reasons then for explaining the Gothic and Arian use of the word "Roman," when applied to the Catholic Church and faith, of something beyond its mere connexion with the Empire, which the barbarians were assaulting; nor would "Roman" surely be the most obvious word to denote the orthodox faith, in the mouths of a people who had learned their heresy from a Roman Emperor and Court, and who professed to direct their belief by the great Latin Council of Ariminum.

 10.

 As then the fourth century presented to us in its external aspect the Catholic Church lying in the midst of a multitude of sects, all enemies to it, so in the fifth and sixth we see the same Church lying in the West under the oppression of a huge, farspreading, and schismatical communion. Heresy is no longer a domestic enemy intermingled with the Church, but it occupies its own ground and is extended over against her, even though on the same territory, and is more or less organized, and cannot be so promptly refuted by the simple test of Catholicity.

 § 2. The Nestorians

 The Churches of Syria and Asia Minor were the most intellectual portion of early Christendom. Alexandria was but one metropolis in a large region, and contained the philosophy of the whole Patriarchate; but Syria abounded in wealthy and luxurious cities, the creation of the Seleucidæ, where the arts and the schools of Greece had full opportunities of cultivation. For a time too, for the first two hundred years, as some think, Alexandria was the only See as well as the only school of Egypt; while Syria was divided into smaller dioceses, each of which had at first an authority of its own, and which, even after the growth of the Patriarchal power, received their respective bishops, not from the See of Antioch, but from their own metropolitan. In Syria too the schools were private, a circumstance which would tend both to diversity in religious opinion, and incaution in the expression of it; but the sole catechetical school of Egypt was the organ of the Church, and its Bishop could banish Origen for speculations which developed and ripened with impunity in Syria.

 2.

 But the immediate source of that fertility in heresy, which is the unhappiness of the ancient Syrian Church, was its celebrated Exegetical School. The history of that School is summed up in the broad characteristic fact, on the one hand that it devoted itself to the literal and critical interpretation of Scripture, and on the other that it gave rise first to the Arian and then to the Nestorian heresy. If additional evidence be wanted of the connexion of heterodoxy and biblical criticism in that age, it is found in the fact that, not long after this coincidence in Syria, they are found combined in the person of Theodore of Heraclea, so called from the place both of his birth and his bishoprick, an able commentator and an active enemy of St. Athanasius, though a Thracian unconnected except by sympathy with the Patriarchate of Antioch.

 The Antiochene School appears to have risen in the middle of the third century; but there is no evidence to determine whether it was a local institution, or, as is more probable, a discipline or method characteristic generally of Syrian teaching. Dorotheus is one of its earliest luminaries; he is known as a Hebrew scholar, as well as a commentator on the sacred text, and he was the master of Eusebius of Cæsarea. Lucian, the friend of the notorious Paul of Samosata, and for three successive Episcopates after him separated from the Church though afterwards a martyr in it, was the author of a new edition of the Septuagint, and master of the chief original teachers of Arianism. Eusebius of Cæsarea, Asterius called the Sophist, and Eusebius of Emesa, Arians of the Nicene period, and Diodorus, a zealous opponent of Arianism, but the master of Theodore of Mopsuestia, have all a place in the Exegetical School. St. Chrysostom and Theodoret, both Syrians, and the former the pupil of Diodorus, adopted the literal interpretation, though preserved from its abuse. But the principal doctor of the School was that Theodore, the master of Nestorius, who has just above been mentioned, and who, with his writings, and with the writings of Theodoret against St. Cyril, and the letter written by Ibas of Edessa to Maris, was condemned by the fifth Ecumenical Council. Ibas was the translator into Syriac, and Maris into Persian, of the books of Theodore and Diodorus [n. 31 ]; and thus they became immediate instruments in the formation of the great Nestorian school and Church in farther Asia.

 As many as ten thousand tracts of Theodore are said in this way to have been introduced to the knowledge of the Christians of Mesopotamia, Adiabene, Babylonia, and the neighbouring countries. He was called by those Churches absolutely "the Interpreter," and it eventually became the very profession of the Nestorian communion to follow him as such. "The doctrine of all our Eastern Churches," says their Council under the Patriarch Marabas, "is founded on the Creed of Nicæa; but in the exposition of the Scriptures we follow St. Theodore." "We must by all means remain firm to the commentaries of the great Commentator," says the Council under Sabarjesus; "whoso shall in any manner oppose them, or think otherwise, be he anathema." [n. 32 ] No one since the beginning of Christianity, except Origen and St. Augustine, has had so great literary influence on his brethren as Theodore [n. 33 ].

 3.

 The original Syrian School had possessed very marked characteristics, which it did not lose when it passed into a new country and into strange tongues. Its comments on Scripture seem to have been clear, natural, methodical, apposite, and logically exact. "In all Western Aramæa," says Lengerke, that is, in Syria, "there was but one mode of treating whether exegetics or doctrine, the practical." [n. 34 ] Thus Eusebius of Cæsarea, whether as a disputant or a commentator, is commonly a writer of sense and judgment; and he is to be referred to the Syrian school, though he does not enter so far into its temper as to exclude the mystical interpretation or to deny the verbal inspiration of Scripture. Again, we see in St. Chrysostom a direct, straightforward treatment of the sacred text, and a pointed application of it to things and persons; and Theodoret abounds in modes of thinking and reasoning which without any great impropriety may be called English. Again, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, though he does not abstain from allegory, shows the character of his school by the great stress he lays upon the study of Scripture, and, I may add, by the peculiar characteristics of his style, which will be appreciated by a modern reader.

 4.

 It would have been well, had the genius of the Syrian theology been ever in the safe keeping of men such as St. Cyril, St. Chrysostom, and Theodoret; but in Theodore of Mopsuestia, nay in Diodorus before him, it developed into those errors, of which Paul of Samosata had been the omen on its rise. As its attention was chiefly directed to the examination of the Scriptures, in its interpretation of the Scriptures was its heretical temper discovered; and though allegory can be made an instrument for evading Scripture doctrine, criticism may more readily be turned to the destruction of doctrine and Scripture together. Theodore was bent on ascertaining the literal sense, an object with which no fault could be found: but, leading him of course to the Hebrew text instead of the Septuagint, it also led him to Jewish commentators. Jewish commentators naturally suggested events and objects short of evangelical as the fulfilment of the prophetical announcements, and, when it was possible, an ethical sense instead of a prophetical. The eighth chapter of Proverbs ceased to bear a Christian meaning, because, as Theodore maintained, the writer of the book had received the gift, not of prophecy, but of wisdom. The Canticles must be interpreted literally; and then it was but an easy, or rather a necessary step, to exclude the book from the Canon. The book of Job too professed to be historical; yet what was it really but a Gentile drama? He also gave up the books of Chronicles and Ezra, and, strange to say, the Epistle of St. James, though it was contained in the Peschito Version of his Church. He denied that Psalms 22 and 69 [21 and 68] applied to our Lord; rather he limited the Messianic passages of the whole book to four; of which the eighth Psalm was one, and the forty-fifth [44] another. The rest he explained of Hezekiah and Zerubbabel, without denying that they might be accommodated to an evangelical sense [n. 35 ]. He explained St. Thomas's words, "My Lord and my God," as an exclamation of joy, and our Lord's "Receive ye the Holy Ghost," as an anticipation of the day of Pentecost. As may be expected he denied the verbal inspiration of Scripture. Also, he held that the deluge did not cover the earth; and, as others before him, he was heterodox on the doctrine of original sin, and denied the eternity of punishment.

 5.

 Maintaining that the real sense of Scripture was, not the scope of a Divine Intelligence, but the intention of the mere human organ of inspiration, Theodore was led to hold, not only that that sense was one in each text, but that it was continuous and single in a context; that what was the subject of the composition in one verse must be the subject in the next, and that if a Psalm was historical or prophetical in its commencement, it was the one or the other to its termination. Even that fulness, of meaning, refinement of thought, subtle versatility of feeling, and delicate reserve or reverent suggestiveness, which poets exemplify, seems to have been excluded from his idea of a sacred composition. Accordingly, if a Psalm contained passages which could not be applied to our Lord, it followed that that Psalm did not properly apply to Him at all, except by accommodation. Such at least is the doctrine of Cosmas, a writer of Theodore's school, who on this ground passes over the twenty-second, sixty-ninth, and other Psalms, and limits the Messianic to the second, the eighth, the forty-fifth, and the hundred and tenth. "David," he says, "did not make common to the servants what belongs to the Lord [n. 36 ] Christ, but what was proper to the Lord he spoke of the Lord, and what was proper to the servants, of servants." [n. 37 ] Accordingly the twenty-second could not properly belong to Christ, because in the beginning it spoke of the " verba delictorum meorum ." A remarkable consequence would follow from this doctrine, that as Christ was to be separated from His Saints, so the Saints were to be separated from Christ; and an opening was made for a denial of the doctrine of their cultus, though this denial in the event has not been developed among the Nestorians. But a more serious consequence is latently contained in it, and nothing else than the Nestorian heresy, viz. that our Lord's manhood is not so intimately included in His Divine Personality that His brethren according to the flesh may be associated with the Image of the One Christ. Here St. Chrysostom pointedly contradicts the doctrine of Theodore, though his fellow-pupil and friend [n. 38 ]; as does St. Ephrem, though a Syrian also [n. 39 ]; and St. Basil [n. 40 ].

 6.

 One other peculiarity of the Syrian school, viewed as independent of Nestorius, should be added: As it tended to the separation of the Divine Person of Christ from His manhood, so did it tend to explain away His Divine Presence in the Sacramental elements. Ernesti seems to consider the school, in modern language, Sacramentarian: and certainly some of the most cogent testimonies brought by moderns against the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist are taken from writers who are connected with that school; as the author, said to be St. Chrysostom, of the Epistle to Cæsarius, Theodoret in his Eranistes, and Facundus. Some countenance too is given to the same view of the Eucharist, at least in some parts of his works, by Origen, whose language concerning the Incarnation also leans to what was afterwards Nestorianism. To these may be added Eusebius [n. 41 ], who, far removed, as he was, from that heresy, was a disciple of the Syrian school. The language of the later Nestorian writers seems to have been of the same character [n. 42 ]. Such then on the whole is the character of that theology of Theodore which passed from Cilicia and Antioch to Edessa first, and then to Nisibis.

 7.

 Edessa, the metropolis of Mesopotamia, had remained an Oriental city till the third century, when it was made a Roman colony by Caracalla [n. 43 ]. Its position on the confines of two empires gave it great ecclesiastical importance, as the channel by which the theology of Rome and Greece was conveyed to a family of Christians, dwelling in contempt and persecution amid a still heathen world. It was the seat of various schools; apparently of a Greek school, where the classics were studied as well as theology, where Eusebius of Emesa [n. 44 ] had originally been trained, and where perhaps Protogenes taught [n. 45 ]. There were also Syrian schools attended by heathen and Christian youths in common. The cultivation of the native language had been an especial object of its masters since the time of Vespasian, so that the pure and refined dialect went by the name of the Edessene [ Name 46 ]. At Edessa too St. Ephrem formed his own Syrian school, which lasted long after him; and there too was the celebrated Persian Christian school, over which Maris presided, who has been already mentioned as the translator of Theodore into Persian [n. 47 ]. Even in the time of the predecessor of Ibas in the See (before A.D . 435) the Nestorianism of this Persian School was so notorious that Rabbula the Bishop had expelled its masters and scholars [n. 48 ]; and they, taking refuge in a country which might be called their own, had introduced the heresy to the Churches subject to the Persian King.

 8.

 Something ought to be said of these Churches; though little is known except what is revealed by the fact, in itself of no slight value, that they had sustained two persecutions at the hands of the heathen government in the fourth and fifth centuries. One testimony is extant as early as the end of the second century, to the effect that in Parthia, Media, Persia, and Bactria there were Christians who "were not overcome by evil laws and customs." [n. 49 ] In the early part of the fourth century, a bishop of Persia attended the Nicene Council, and about the same time Christianity is said to have pervaded nearly the whole of Assyria [n. 50 ]. Monachism had been introduced there before the middle of the fourth century, and shortly after commenced that fearful persecution in which sixteen thousand Christians are said to have suffered. It lasted thirty years, and is said to have recommenced at the end of the Century. The second persecution lasted for at least another thirty years of the next, at the very time when the Nestorian troubles were in progress in the Empire. Trials such as these show the populousness as well as the faith of the Churches in those parts, and the number of the Sees, for the names of twenty-seven Bishops are preserved who suffered in the former persecution. One of them was apprehended together with sixteen priests, nine deacons, besides monks and nuns of his diocese; another with twenty-eight companions, ecclesiastics or regulars; another with one hundred ecclesiastics of different orders; another with one hundred and twenty-eight; another with his chorepiscopus and two hundred and fifty of his clergy. Such was the Church, consecrated by the blood of so many martyrs, which immediately after its glorious confession fell a prey to the theology of Theodore; and which through a succession of ages manifested the energy, when it had lost the pure orthodoxy of Saints.

 9.

 The members of the Persian school, who had been driven out of Edessa by Rabbula, found a wide field open for their exertions under the pagan government with which they had taken refuge. The Persian monarchs, who had often prohibited by edict [n. 51 ] the intercommunion of the Church under their sway with the countries towards the west, readily extended their protection to exiles, whose very profession was the means of destroying its Catholicity. Barsumas, the most energetic of them, was placed in the metropolitan See of Nisibis, where also the fugitive school was settled under the presidency of another of their party; while Maris was promoted to the See of Ardaschir. The primacy of the Church had from an early period belonged to the See of Seleucia in Babylonia. Catholicus was the title appropriated to its occupant, as well as to the Persian Primate, as being deputies of the Patriarch of Antioch, and was derived apparently from the Imperial dignity so called, denoting their function as Procurators-general, or officers in chief for the regions in which they were placed. Acacius, another of the Edessene party, was put into this principal See, and suffered, if he did not further, the innovations of Barsumas. The mode by which the latter effected those measures has been left on record by an enemy. "Barsumas accused Babuæus, the Catholicus, before King Pherozes, whispering, 'These men hold the faith of the Romans, and are their spies. Give me power against them to arrest them.'" [n. 52 ] It is said that in this way he obtained the death of Babuæus, whom Acacius succeeded. When a minority resisted [n. 53 ] the process of schism, a persecution followed. The death of seven thousand seven hundred Catholics is said by Monophysite authorities to have been the price of the severance of the Chaldaic Churches from Christendom [n. 54 ]. Their loss was compensated in the eyes of the Government by the multitude of Nestorian fugitives, who flocked into Persia from the Empire, numbers of them industrious artisans, who sought a country where their own religion was in the ascendant.

 10.

 That religion was founded, as we have already seen, in the literal interpretation of Holy Scripture, of which Theodore was the principal teacher. The doctrine, in which it formally consisted, is known by the name of Nestorianism: it lay in the ascription of a human as well as a Divine Personality to our Lord; and it showed itself in denying the title of "Mother of God," or [ theotokos ] to the Blessed Mary. As to our Lord's Personality, the question of language came into the controversy, which always serves to perplex a subject and make a dispute seem a matter of words. The native Syrians made a distinction between the word "Person," and "Prosopon," which stands for it in Greek; they allowed that there was one Prosopon or Parsopa, as they called it, and they held that there were two Persons. If it is asked what they meant by parsopa, the answer seems to be, that they took the word merely in the sense of character or aspect, a sense familiar to the Greek prosopon, and quite irrelevant as a guarantee of their orthodoxy. It follows moreover that, since the aspect of a thing is its impression upon the beholder, the personality to which they ascribed unity must have laid in our Lord's manhood, and not in His Divine Nature. But it is hardly worth while pursuing the heresy to its limits. Next, as to the phrase "Mother of God," they rejected it as unscriptural; they maintained that St. Mary was Mother of the humanity of Christ, not of the Word, and they fortified themselves by the Nicene Creed, in which no such title is ascribed to her.

 11.

 Whatever might be the obscurity or the plausibility of their original dogma, there is nothing obscure or attractive in the developments, whether of doctrine or of practice, in which it issued. The first act of the exiles of Edessa, on their obtaining power in the Chaldean communion, was to abolish the celibacy of the clergy, or, in Gibbon's forcible words, to allow "the public and reiterated nuptials of the priests, the bishops, and even the patriarch himself." Barsumas, the great instrument of the change of religion, was the first to set an example of the new usage, and is even said by a Nestorian writer to have married a nun [n. 55 ]. He passed a Canon at Councils, held at Seleucia and elsewhere, that bishops and priests might marry, and might renew their wives as often as they lost them. The Catholicus who followed Acacius went so far as to extend the benefit of the Canon to Monks, that is, to destroy the Monastic order; and his two successors availed themselves of this liberty, and are recorded to have been fathers. A restriction, however, was afterwards placed upon the Catholicus, and upon the Episcopal order.

 12.

 Such were the circumstances, and such the principles, under which the See of Seleucia became the Rome of the East. In the course of time the Catholicus took on himself the loftier and independent title of Patriarch of Babylon; and though Seleucia was changed for Ctesiphon and for Bagdad [n. 56 ], still the name of Babylon was preserved from first to last as a formal or ideal Metropolis. In the time of the Caliphs, it was at the head of as many as twenty-five Archbishops; its Communion extended from China to Jerusalem; and its numbers, with those of the Monophysites, are said to have surpassed those of the Greek and Latin Churches together. The Nestorians seem to have been unwilling, like the Novatians, to be called by the name of their founder [n. 57 ], though they confessed it had adhered to them; one instance may be specified of their assuming the name of Catholic [n. 58 ], but there is nothing to show it was given them by others.

 "From the conquest of Persia," says Gibbon, "they carried their spiritual arms to the North, the East, and the South; and the simplicity of the Gospel was fashioned and painted with the colours of the Syriac theology. In the sixth century, according to the report of a Nestorian traveller, Christianity was successfully preached to the Bactrians, the Huns, the Persians, the Indians, the Persarmenians, the Medes, and the Elamites: the Barbaric Churches from the gulf of Persia to the Caspian Sea were almost infinite; and their recent faith was conspicuous in the number and sanctity of their monks and martyrs. The pepper coast of Malabar and the isles of the ocean, Socotra and Ceylon, were peopled with an increasing multitude of Christians, and the bishops and clergy of those sequestered regions derived their ordination from the Catholicus of Babylon. In a subsequent age, the zeal of the Nestorians overleaped the limits which had confined the ambition and curiosity both of the Greeks and Persians. The missionaries of Balch and Samarcand pursued without fear the footsteps of the roving Tartar, and insinuated themselves into the camps of the valleys of Imaus and the banks of the Selinga." [n. 59 ] § 3. The Monophysites

 Eutyches was Archimandrite, or Abbot, of a Monastery in the suburbs of Constantinople; he was a man of unexceptionable character, and was of the age of seventy years, and had been Abbot for thirty, at the date of his unhappy introduction into ecclesiastical history. He had been the friend and assistant of St. Cyril of Alexandria, and had lately taken part against Ibas, Bishop of Edessa, whose name has occurred in the above account of the Nestorians. For some time he had been engaged in teaching a doctrine concerning the Incarnation, which he maintained indeed to be none other than that of St. Cyril's in his controversy with Nestorius, but which others denounced as a heresy in the opposite extreme, and substantially a reassertion of Apollinarianism. The subject was brought before a Council of Constantinople, under the presidency of Flavian, the Patriarch, in the year 448; and Eutyches was condemned by the assembled Bishops of holding the doctrine of One, instead of Two Natures in Christ.

 2.

 It is scarcely necessary for our present purpose to ascertain accurately what he held, and there has been a great deal of controversy on the subject; partly from confusion between him and his successors, partly from the indecision or the ambiguity which commonly attaches to the professions of heretics. If a statement must here be made of the doctrine of Eutyches himself, in whom the controversy began, let it be said to consist in these two tenets: in maintaining first, that "before the Incarnation there were two natures, after their union one," or that our Lord was of or from two natures, but not in two; and, secondly, that His flesh was not of one substance with ours, that is, not of the substance of the Blessed Virgin. Of these two points, he seemed willing to abandon the second, but was firm in his maintenance of the first. But let us return to the Council of Constantinople.

 In his examination Eutyches allowed that the Holy Virgin was consubstantial with us, and that "our God was incarnate of her;" but he would not allow that He was therefore, as man, consubstantial with us, his notion apparently being that union with the Divinity had changed what otherwise would have been human nature. However, when pressed, he said, that, though up to that day he had not permitted himself to discuss the nature of Christ, or to affirm that "God's body is man's body though it was human," yet he would allow, if commanded, our Lord's consubstantiality with us. Upon this Flavian observed that "the Council was introducing no innovation, but declaring the faith of the Fathers." To his other position, however, that our Lord had but one nature after the Incarnation, he adhered: when the Catholic doctrine was put before him, he answered, "Let St. Athanasius be read; you will find nothing of the kind in him."

 His condemnation followed: it was signed by twenty-two Bishops and twenty-three Abbots [n. 60 ]; among the former were Flavian of Constantinople, Basil metropolitan of Seleucia in Isauria, the metropolitans of Amasea in Pontus, and Marcianopolis in M S sia, and the Bishop of Cos, the Pope's minister at Constantinople.

 3.

 Eutyches appealed to the Pope of the day, St. Leo, who at first hearing took his part. He wrote to Flavian that, "judging by the statement of Eutyches, he did not see with what justice he had been separated from the communion of the Church." "Send therefore," he continued, "some suitable person to give us a full account of what has occurred, and let us know what the new error is." St. Flavian, who had behaved with great forbearance throughout the proceedings, had not much difficulty in setting the controversy before the Pope in its true light.

 Eutyches was supported by the Imperial Court, and by Dioscorus the Patriarch of Alexandria; the proceedings therefore at Constantinople were not allowed to settle the question. A general Council was summoned for the ensuing summer at Ephesus, where the third Ecumenical Council had been held twenty years before against Nestorius. It was attended by sixty metropolitans, ten from each of the great divisions of the East; the whole number of bishops assembled amounted to one hundred and thirty-five [n. 61 ]. Dioscorus was appointed President by the Emperor, and the object of the assembly was said to be the settlement of a question of faith which had arisen between Flavian and Eutyches. St. Leo, dissatisfied with the measure altogether, nevertheless sent his legates, but with the object, as their commission stated, and a letter he addressed to the Council, of "condemning the heresy, and reinstating Eutyches if he retracted." His legates took precedence after Dioscorus and before the other Patriarchs. He also published at this time his celebrated Tome on the Incarnation, in a letter addressed to Flavian.

 The proceedings which followed were of so violent a character, that the Council has gone down to posterity under the name of the Latrocinium or "Gang of Robbers." Eutyches was honourably acquitted, and his doctrine received; but the assembled Fathers showed some backwardness to depose St. Flavian. Dioscorus had been attended by a multitude of monks, furious zealots for the Monophysite doctrine from Syria and Egypt, and by an armed force. These broke into the Church at his call; Flavian was thrown down and trampled on, and received injuries of which he died the third day after. The Pope's legates escaped as they could; and the Bishops were compelled to sign a blank paper, which was afterwards filled up with the condemnation of Flavian. These outrages, however, were subsequent to the Synodical acceptance of the Creed of Eutyches, which seems to have been the spontaneous act of the assembled Fathers. The proceedings ended by Dioscorus excommunicating the Pope, and the Emperor issuing an edict in approval of the decision of the Council.

 4.

 Before continuing the narrative, let us pause awhile to consider what it has already brought before us. An aged and blameless man, the friend of a Saints and him the great champion of the faith against the heresy of his day, is found in the belief and maintenance of a doctrine, which he declares to be the very doctrine which that Saint taught in opposition to that heresy. To prove it, he and his friends refer to the very words of St. Cyril; Eustathius of Berytus quoting from him at Ephesus as follows: "We must not then conceive two natures, but one nature of the Word incarnate." [n. 62 ] Moreover, it seems that St. Cyril had been called to account for this very phrase, and had appealed more than once to a passage, which is extant as he quoted it, in a work by St. Athanasius [n. 63 ]. Whether the passage in question is genuine is very doubtful, but that is not to the purpose; for the phrase which it contains is also attributed by St. Cyril to other Fathers, and was admitted by Catholics generally, as by St. Flavian, who deposed Eutyches, nay was indirectly adopted by the Council of Chalcedon itself.

 5.

 But Eutyches did not merely insist upon a phrase; he appealed for his doctrine to the Fathers generally; "I have read the blessed Cyril, and the holy Fathers, and the holy Athanasius," he says at Constantinople, "that they said, 'Of two natures before the union,' but that 'after the union' they said 'but one.'" [n. 64 ] In his letter to St. Leo, he appeals in particular to Pope Julius, Pope Felix, St. Gregory Thaumaturgus, St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. Basil, Atticus, and St. Proclus. He did not appeal to them unreservedly certainly, as shall be presently noticed; he allowed that they might err, and perhaps had erred, in their expressions: but it is plain, even from what has been said, that there could be no consensus against him, as the word is now commonly understood. It is also undeniable that, though the word "nature" is applied to our Lord's manhood by St. Ambrose, St. Gregory Nazianzen and others, yet on the whole it is for whatever reason avoided by the previous Fathers; certainly by St. Athanasius, who uses the words "manhood," "flesh," "the man," "economy," where a later writer would have used "nature:" and the same is true of St. Hilary [n. 65 ]. In like manner, the Athanasian Creed, written, as it is supposed, some twenty years before the date of Eutyches, does not contain the word "nature." Much might be said on the plausibility of the defence, which Eutyches might have made for his doctrine from the history and documents of the Church before his time.

 6.

 Further, Eutyches professed to subscribe heartily the decrees of the Council of Nicæa and Ephesus, and his friends appealed to the latter of these Councils and to previous Fathers, in proof that nothing could be added to the Creed of the Church. "I," he says to St. Leo, "even from my elders have so understood, and from my childhood have so been instructed, as the holy and Ecumenical Council at Nicæa of the three hundred and eighteen most blessed Bishops settled the faith, and which the holy Council held at Ephesus maintained and defined anew as the only faith; and I have never understood otherwise than as the right or only true orthodox faith hath enjoined." He says at the Latrocinium, "When I declared that my faith was conformable to the decision of Nicæa, confirmed at Ephesus, they demanded that I should add some words to it; and I, fearing to act contrary to the decrees of the First Council of Ephesus and of the Council of Nicæa, desired that your holy Council might be made acquainted with it, since I was ready to submit to whatever you should approve." [n. 66 ] Dioscorus states the matter more strongly: "We have heard," he says, "what this Council" of Ephesus "decreed, that if any one affirm or opine anything, or raise any question, beyond the Creed aforesaid" of Nicæa, "he is to be condemned." [n. 67 ] It is remarkable that the Council of Ephesus, which laid down this rule, had itself sanctioned the Theotocos, an addition, greater perhaps than any before or since, to the letter of the primitive faith.

 7.

 Further, Eutyches appealed to Scripture, and denied that a human nature was there given to our Lord; and this appeal obliged him in consequence to refuse an unconditional assent to the Councils and Fathers, though he so confidently spoke about them at other times. It was urged against him that the Nicene Council itself had introduced into the Creed extra-scriptural terms. "'I have never found in Scripture,' he said," according to one of the Priests who were sent to him, "'that there are two natures.' I replied, 'Neither is the Consubstantiality,'" (the Homoüsion of Nicæa,) "'to be found in the Scriptures, but in the Holy Fathers who well understood them and faithfully expounded them.'" [n. 68 ] Accordingly, on another occasion, a report was made of him, that "he professed himself ready to assent to the Exposition of Faith made by the Holy Fathers of the Nicene and Ephesine Councils and he engaged to subscribe their interpretations. However, if there were any accidental fault or error in any expressions which they made, this he would neither blame nor accept; but only search the Scriptures, as being surer than the expositions of the Fathers; that since the time of the Incarnation of God the Word ... he worshipped one Nature ... that the doctrine that our Lord Jesus Christ came of Two Natures personally united, this it was that he had learned from the expositions of the Holy Fathers; nor did he accept, if aught was read to him from any author to [another] effect, because the Holy Scriptures, as he said, were better than the teaching of the Fathers." [n. 69 ] This appeal to the Scriptures will remind us of what has lately been said of the school of Theodore in the history of Nestorianism, and of the challenge of the Arians to St. Avitus before the Gothic King [n. 70 ]. It had also been the characteristic of heresy in the antecedent period. St. Hilary brings together a number of instances in point, from the history of Marcellus, Photinus, Sabellius, Montanus, and Manes; then he adds, "They all speak Scripture without the sense of Scripture, and profess a faith without faith." [n. 71 ]

 8.

 Once more; the Council of the Latrocinium, however, tyrannized over by Dioscorus in the matter of St. Flavian, certainly did acquit Eutyches and accept his doctrine canonically, and, as it would appear, cordially; though their change at Chalcedon, and the subsequent variations of the East, make it a matter of little moment how they decided. The Acts of Constantinople were read to the Fathers of the Latrocinium; when they came to the part where Eusebius of Dorylæum, the accuser of Eutyches, asked him, whether he confessed Two Natures after the Incarnation, and the Consubstantiality according to the flesh, the Fathers broke in upon the reading: "Away with Eusebius; burn him; burn him alive; cut him in two; as he divided, so let him be divided." [n. 72 ] The Council seems to have been unanimous, with the exception of the Pope's Legates, in the restoration of Eutyches; a more complete decision can hardly be imagined.

 It is true the whole number of signatures now extant, one hundred and eight, may seem small out of a thousand, the number of Sees in the East; but the attendance of Councils always bore a representative character. The whole number of East and West was about eighteen hundred, yet the second Ecumenical Council was attended by only one hundred and fifty, which is but a twelfth part of the whole number; the Third Council by about two hundred, or a ninth; the Council of Nicæa itself numbered only three hundred and eighteen Bishops. Moreover, when we look through the names subscribed to the Synodal decision, we find that the misbelief, or misapprehension, or weakness, to which this great offence must be attributed, was no local phenomenon, but the unanimous sin of Bishops in every patriarchate and of every school of the East. Three out of the four patriarchs were in favour of the heresiarch, the fourth being on his trial. Of these Domnus of Antioch and Juvenal of Jerusalem acquitted him, on the ground of his confessing the faith of Nicæa and Ephesus: and Domnus was a man of the fairest and purest character, and originally a disciple of St. Euthemius, however inconsistent on this occasion, and ill-advised in former steps of his career. Dioscorus, violent and bad man as he showed himself, had been Archdeacon to St. Cyril, whom he attended at the Council of Ephesus; and was on this occasion supported by those Churches which had so nobly stood by their patriarch Athanasius in the great Arian conflict. These three Patriarchs were supported by the Exarchs of Ephesus and Cæsarea in Cappadocia; and both of these as well as Domnus and Juvenal, were supported in turn by their subordinate Metropolitans. Even the Sees under the influence of Constantinople, which was the remaining sixth division of the East, took part with Eutyches. We find among the signatures to his acquittal the Bishops of Dyrrachium, of Heraclea in Macedonia, of Messene in the Peloponese, of Sebaste in Armenia, of Tarsus, of Damascus, of Berytus, of Bostra in Arabia, of Amida in Mesopotamia, of Himeria in Orshoëne, of Babylon, of Arsinoe in Egypt, and of Cyrene. The Bishops of Palestine, of Macedonia, and of Achaia, where the keen eye of St. Athanasius had detected the doctrine in its germ, while Apollinarianism was but growing into form, were his actual partisans. Another Barsumas, a Syrian Abbot, ignorant of Greek, attended the Latrocinium, as the representative of the monks of his nation, whom he formed into a force, material or moral, of a thousand strong, and whom at that infamous assembly he cheered on to the murder of St. Flavian.

 9.

 Such was the state of Eastern Christendom in the year 449; a heresy, appealing to the Fathers, to the Creed, and, above all, to Scripture, was by a general Council, professing to be Ecumenical, received as true in the person of its promulgator. If the East could determine a matter of faith independently of the West, certainly the Monophysite heresy was established as Apostolic truth in all its provinces from Macedonia to Egypt.

 There has been a time in the history of Christianity, when it had been Athanasius against the world, and the world against Athanasius. The need and straitness of the Church had been great, and one man was raised up for her deliverance. In this second necessity, who was the destined champion of her who cannot fail? Whence did he come, and what was his name? He came with an augury of victory upon him, which even Athanasius could not show; it was Leo, Bishop of Rome.

 10.

 Leo's augury of success, which even Athanasius had not, was this, that he was seated in the chair of St. Peter and the heir of his prerogatives. In the very beginning of the controversy, St. Peter Chrysologus had urged this grave consideration upon Eutyches himself, in words which have already been cited: "I exhort you, my venerable brother," he had said, "to submit yourself in everything to what has been written by the blessed Pope of Rome; for St. Peter, who lives and presides in his own See, gives the true faith to those who seek it." [n. 73 ] This voice had come from Ravenna, and now after the Latrocinium it was echoed back from the depths of Syria by the learned Theodoret. "That all-holy See," he says in a letter to one of the Pope's Legates, "has the office of heading ( [ h e gemonian ] ) the whole world's Churches for many reasons; and above all others, because it has remained free of the communion of heretical taint, and no one of heterodox sentiments hath sat in it, but it hath preserved the Apostolic grace unsullied." [n. 74 ] And a third testimony in encouragement of the faithful at the same dark moment issued from the Imperial court of the West. "We are bound," says Valentinian to the Emperor of the East, "to preserve inviolate in our times the prerogative of particular reverence to the blessed Apostle Peter; that the most blessed Bishop of Rome, to whom Antiquity assigned the priesthood over all ( [ kata pant o n ] ) may have place and opportunity of judging concerning the faith and the priests." [n. 75 ] Nor had Leo himself been wanting at the same time in "the confidence" he had "obtained from the most blessed Peter and head of the Apostles, that he had authority to defend the truth for the peace of the Church." [n. 76 ] Thus Leo introduces us to the Council of Chalcedon, by which he rescued the East from a grave heresy.

 11.

 The Council met on the 8th of October, 451, and was attended by the largest number of Bishops of any Council before or since; some say by as many as six hundred and thirty. Of these, only four came from the West, two Roman Legates and two Africans [n. 77 ].

 Its proceedings were opened by the Pope's Legates, who said that they had it in charge from the Bishop of Rome, "which is the head of all the Churches," to demand that Dioscorus should not sit, on the ground that "he had presumed to hold a Council without the authority of the Apostolic See, which had never been done nor was lawful to do." [n. 78 ] This was immediately allowed them.

 The next act of the Council was to give admission to Theodoret, who had been deposed at the Latrocinium. The Imperial officers present urged his admission, on the ground that "the most holy Archbishop Leo hath restored him to the Episcopal office, and the most pious Emperor hath ordered that he should assist at the holy Council." [n. 79 ]

 Presently, a charge was brought forward against Dioscorus, that, though the Legates had presented a letter from the Pope to the Council, it had not been read. Dioscorus admitted not only the fact, but its relevancy; but alleged in excuse that he had twice ordered it to be read in vain.

 In the course of the reading of the Acts of the Latrocinium and Constantinople, a number of Bishops moved from the side of Dioscorus and placed themselves with the opposite party. When Peter, Bishop of Corinth, crossed over, the Orientals whom he joined shouted, "Peter thinks as does Peter; orthodox Bishop, welcome."

 12.

 In the second Session it was the duty of the Fathers to draw up a confession of faith condemnatory of the heresy. A committee was formed for the purpose, and the Creed of Nicæa and Constantinople was read; then some of the Epistles of St. Cyril; lastly, St. Leo's Tome, which had been passed over in silence at the Latrocinium. Some discussion followed upon the last of these documents, but at length the Bishops cried out, "This is the faith of the Fathers; this is the faith of the Apostles: we all believe thus; the orthodox believe thus; anathema to him who does not believe thus. Peter has thus spoken through Leo; the Apostles taught thus." Readings from the other Fathers followed; and then some days were allowed for private discussion, before drawing up the confession of faith which was to set right the heterodoxy of the Latrocinium. During the interval, Dioscorus was tried and condemned; sentence was pronounced against him by the Pope's Legates, and ran thus: "The most holy Archbishop of Rome, Leo, through us and this present Council, with the Apostle St. Peter, who is the rock and foundation of the Catholic Church and of the orthodox faith, deprives him of the Episcopal dignity and every sacerdotal ministry."

 In the fourth Session the question of the definition of faith came on again, but the Council got no further than this, that it received the definitions of the three previous Ecumenical Councils; it would not add to them what Leo required. One hundred and sixty Bishops however subscribed his Tome.

 13.

 In the fifth Session the question came on once more; some sort of definition of faith was the result of the labours of the committee, and was accepted by the great majority of the Council. The Bishops cried out, "We are all satisfied with the definition; it is the faith of the Fathers; anathema to him who thinks otherwise: drive out the Nestorians." When objectors appeared, Anatolius, the new Patriarch of Constantinople, asked "Did not every one yesterday consent to the definition of faith?" on which the Bishops answered, "Every one consented; we do not believe otherwise; it is the Faith of the Fathers; let it be set down that Holy Mary is the Mother of God: let this be added to the Creed; put out the Nestorians." [n. 80 ] The objectors were the Pope's Legates, supported by a certain number of Orientals: those clear-sighted, firm-minded Latins understood full well what and what alone was the true expression of orthodox doctrine under the emergency of the existing heresy. They had been instructed to induce the Council to pass a declaration to the effect, that Christ was not only "of," but "in" two natures. However, they did not enter upon disputation on the point, but they used a more intelligible argument: If the Fathers did not consent to the letter of the blessed Bishop Leo, they would leave the Council and go home. The Imperial officers took the part of the Legates. The Council however persisted: "Every one approved the definition; let it be subscribed: he who refuses to subscribe it is a heretic." They even proceeded to refer it to Divine inspiration. The officers asked if they received St. Leo's Tome; they answered that they had subscribed it, but that they would not introduce its contents into their definition of faith. "We are for no other definition." they said; "nothing is wanting in this."

 14.

 Notwithstanding, the Pope's Legates gained their point through the support of the Emperor Marcian, who had succeeded Theodosius. A fresh committee was obtained under the threat that, if they resisted, the Council should be transferred to the West. Some voices were raised against this measure; the cries were repeated against the Roman party, "They are Nestorians; let them go to Rome." The Imperial officers remonstrated, "Dioscorus said, 'Of two natures;' Leo says, 'Two natures:' which will you follow, Leo or Dioscorus?" On their answering "Leo," they continued, "Well then, add to the definition, according to the judgment of our most holy Leo." Nothing more was to be said. The committee immediately proceeded to their work, and in a short time returned to the assembly with such a definition as the Pope required. After reciting the Creed of Nicæa and Constantinople, it observes, "This Creed were sufficient for the perfect knowledge of religion, but the enemies of the truth have invented novel expressions;" and therefore it proceeds to state the faith more explicitly. When this was read through, the Bishops all exclaimed, "This is the faith of the Fathers; we all follow it." And thus ended the controversy once for all.

 The Council, after its termination, addressed a letter to St. Leo; in it the Fathers acknowledge him as "constituted interpreter of the voice of Blessed Peter," [n. 81 ] (with an allusion to St. Peter's Confession in Matthew xvi.,) and speak of him as "the very one commissioned with the guardianship of the Vine by the Saviour."

 15.

 Such is the external aspect of those proceedings by which the Catholic faith has been established in Christendom against the Monophysites. That the definition passed at Chalcedon is the Apostolic Truth once delivered to the Saints is most firmly to be received, from faith in that overruling Providence which is by special promise extended over the acts of the Church; moreover, that it is in simple accordance with the faith of St. Athanasius, St. Gregory Nazianzen, and all the other Fathers, will be evident to the theological student in proportion as he becomes familiar with their works: but the historical account of the Council is this, that a formula which the Creed did not contain, which the Fathers did not unanimously witness, and which some eminent Saints had almost in set terms opposed, which the whole East refused as a symbol, not once, but twice, patriarch by patriarch, metropolitan by metropolitan, first by the mouth of above a hundred, then by the mouth of above six hundred of its Bishops, and refused upon the grounds of its being an addition to the Creed, was forced upon the Council, not indeed as being such an addition, yet, on the other hand, not for subscription merely, but for acceptance as a definition of faith under the sanction of an anathema, forced on the Council by the resolution of the Pope of the day, acting through his Legates and supported by the civil power [n. 82 ].

 16.

 It cannot be supposed that such a transaction would approve itself to the Churches of Egypt, and the event showed it: they disowned the authority of the Council, and called its adherents Chalcedonians [n. 83 ], and Synodites [n. 84 ]. For here was the West tyrannizing over the East, forcing it into agreement with itself, resolved to have one and one only form of words, rejecting the definition of faith which the East had drawn up in Council, bidding it and making it frame another, dealing peremptorily and sternly with the assembled Bishops, and casting contempt on the most sacred traditions of Egypt! What was Eutyches to them? He might be guilty or innocent; they gave him up: Dioscorus had given him up at Chalcedon [n. 85 ]; they did not agree with him [n. 86 ]: he was an extreme man; they would not call themselves by human titles; they were not Eutychians; Eutyches was not their master, but Athanasius and Cyril were their doctors [n. 87 ]. The two great lights of their Church, the two greatest and most successful polemical Fathers that Christianity had seen, had both pronounced "One Nature Incarnate," though allowing Two before the Incarnation; and though Leo and his Council had not gone so far as to deny this phrase, they had proceeded to say what was the contrary to it, to explain away, to overlay the truth, by defining that the Incarnate Saviour was "in Two Natures." At Ephesus it had been declared that the Creed should not be touched; the Chalcedonian Fathers had, not literally, but virtually added to it: by subscribing Leo's Tome, and promulgating their definition of faith, they had added what might be called, "The Creed of Pope Leo."

 17.

 It is remarkable, as has been just stated, that Dioscorus, wicked man as he was in act, was of the moderate or middle school in doctrine, as the violent and able Severus after him; and from the first the great body of the protesting party disowned Eutyches, whose form of the heresy took refuge in Armenia, where it remains to this day. The Armenians alone were pure Eutychians, and so zealously such that they innovated on the ancient and recognized custom of mixing water with the wine in the Holy Eucharist, and consecrated the wine by itself in token of the one nature, as they considered, of the Christ. Elsewhere both name and doctrine of Eutyches were abjured; the heretical bodies in Egypt and Syria took a title from their special tenet, and formed the Monophysite communion. Their theology was at once simple and specious. They based it upon the illustration which is familiar to us in the Athanasian Creed, and which had been used by St. Gregory Nazianzen, St. Cyril, St. Augustine, Vincent of Lerins, not to say St. Leo himself. They argued that as body and soul made up one man, so God and man made up but one, though one compound Nature, in Christ. It might have been charitably hoped that their difference from the Catholics had been a simple matter of words, as it is allowed by Vigillus of Thapsus really to have been in many cases; but their refusal to obey the voice of the Church was a token of real error in their faith, and their implicit heterodoxy is proved by their connexion, in spite of themselves, with the extreme or ultra party whom they so vehemently disowned.

 It is very observable that, ingenious as is their theory and sometimes perplexing to a disputant, the Monophysites never could shake themselves free of the Eutychians; and though they could draw intelligible lines on paper between the two doctrines, yet in fact by a hidden fatality their partisans were ever running into or forming alliance with the anathematized extreme. Thus Peter the Fuller the Theopaschite (Eutychian), is at one time in alliance with Peter the Stammerer, who advocated the Henoticon (which was Monophysite). The Acephali, though separating from the latter Peter for that advocacy, and accused by Leontius of being Gaianites [n. 88 ] (Eutychians), are considered by Facundus as Monophysites [n. 89 ]. Timothy the Cat, who is said to have agreed with Dioscorus and Peter the Stammerer, who signed the Henoticon, that is, with two Monophysite Patriarchs, is said nevertheless, according to Anastasius, to have maintained the extreme tenet, that "the Divinity is the sole nature of Christ." [n. 90 ] Severus, according to Anastasius [n. 90 ], symbolized with the Phantasiasts (Eutychians), yet he is more truly, according to Leontius, the chief doctor and leader of the Monophysites. And at one time there was an union, though temporary, between the Theodosians (Monophysites) and the Gaianites.

 18.

 Such a division of an heretical party, into the maintainers, of an extreme and a moderate view, perspicuous and plausible on paper, yet in fact unreal, impracticable, and hopeless, was no new phenomenon in the history of the Church. As Eutyches put forward an extravagant tenet, which was first corrected into the Monophysite, and then relapsed hopelessly into the doctrine of the Phantasiasts and the Theopaschites, so had Arius been superseded by the Eusebians and had revived in Eunomius; and as the moderate Eusebians had formed the great body of the dissentients from the Nicene Council, so did the Monophysites include the mass of those who protested against Chalcedon; and as the Eusebians had been moderate in creed, yet unscrupulous in act, so were the Monophysites. And as the Eusebians were ever running individually into pure Arianism, so did the Monophysites run into pure Eutychianism. And as the Monophysites set themselves against Pope Leo, so had the Eusebians, with even less provocation, withstood and complained of Pope Julius. In like manner, the Apollinarians had divided into two sects; one, with Timotheus, going the whole length of the inferences which the tenet of their master involved, and the more cautious or timid party making an unintelligible stand with Valentinus. Again, in the history of Nestorianism, though it admitted less opportunity for division of opinion, the See of Rome was with St. Cyril in one extreme, Nestorius in the other, and between them the great Eastern party, headed by John of Antioch and Theodoret, not heretical, but for a time dissatisfied with the Council of Ephesus.

 19.

 The Nestorian heresy, I have said, gave less opportunity for doctrinal varieties than the heresy of Eutyches. Its spirit was rationalizing, and had the qualities which go with rationalism. When cast out of the Roman Empire, it addressed itself, as we have seen, to a new and rich field of exertion, got possession of an Established Church, cooperated with the civil government, adopted secular fashions, and, by whatever means, pushed itself out into an Empire. Apparently, though it requires a very intimate knowledge of its history to speak except conjecturally, it was a political power rather than a dogma, and despised the science of theology. Eutychianism, on the other hand, was mystical, severe, enthusiastic; with the exception of Severus, and one or two more, it was supported by little polemical skill; it had little hold upon the intellectual Greeks of Syria and Asia Minor, but flourished in Egypt, which was far behind the East in civilization, and among the native Syrians. Nestorianism, like Arianism [n. 91 ] before it, was a cold religion, and more fitted for the schools than for the many; but the Monophysites carried the people with them. Like modern Jansenism, and unlike Nestorianism, the Monophysites were famous for their austerities. They have, or had, five Lents in the year, during which laity as well as clergy abstain not only from flesh and eggs, but from wine, oil, and fish [n. 92 ]. Monachism was a characteristic part of their ecclesiastical system: their Bishops, and Maphrian or Patriarch, were always taken from the Monks, who are even said to have worn an iron shirt or breastplate as a part of their monastic habit [n. 93 ].

 20.

 Severus, Patriarch of Antioch at the end of the fifth century, has already been mentioned as an exception to the general character of the Monophysites, and, by his learning and ability, may be accounted the founder of its theology. Their cause, however, had been undertaken by the Emperors themselves before him. For the first thirty years after the Council of Chalcedon, the protesting Church of Egypt had been the scene of continued tumult and bloodshed. Dioscorus had been popular with the people for his munificence, in spite of the extreme laxity of his morals, and for a while the Imperial Government failed in obtaining the election of a Catholic successor. At length Proterius, a man of fair character, and the Vicar-general of Dioscorus on his absence at Chalcedon, was chosen, consecrated, and enthroned; but the people rose against the civil authorities, and the military, coming to their defence, were attacked with stones, and pursued into a church, where they were burned alive by the mob. Next, the popular leaders prepared to intercept the supplies of grain which were destined for Constantinople; and, a defensive retaliation taking place, Alexandria was starved. Then a force of two thousand men was sent for the restoration of order, who permitted themselves in scandalous excesses towards the women of Alexandria. Proterius's life was attempted, and he was obliged to be attended by a guard. The Bishops of Egypt would not submit to him; two of his own clergy, who afterward succeeded him, Timothy and Peter, seceded, and were joined by four or five of the Bishops and by the mass of the population [n. 94 ]; and the Catholic Patriarch was left without a communion in Alexandria. He held a council, and condemned the schismatics; and the Emperor, seconding his efforts, sent them out of the country, and enforced the laws against the Eutychians. An external quiet succeeded; then Marcian died; and then forthwith Timothy (the Cat) made his appearance again, first in Egypt, then in Alexandria. The people rose in his favour, and carried in triumph their persecuted champion to the great Cæsarean Church, where he was consecrated Patriarch by two deprived Bishops, who had been put out of their sees, whether by a Council of Egypt or of Palestine [n. 95 ]. Timothy, now raised to the Episcopal rank, began to create a new succession; he ordained Bishops for the Churches of Egypt, and drove into exile those who were in possession. The Imperial troops, who had been stationed in Upper Egypt, returned to Alexandria; the mob rose again, broke into the Church, where St. Proterius was in prayer, and murdered him. A general ejectment of the Catholic clergy throughout Egypt followed. On their betaking themselves to Constantinople to the new Emperor, Timothy and his party addressed him also. They quoted the Fathers, and demanded the abrogation of the Council of Chalcedon. Next they demanded a conference; the Catholics said that what was once done could not be undone; their opponents agreed to this and urged it, as their very argument against Chalcedon, that it added to the faith, and reversed former decisions [n. 96 ]. After a rule of three years, Timothy was driven out and Catholicism restored; but then in turn the Monophysites rallied, and this state of warfare and alternate success continued for thirty years.

 21.

 At length the Imperial Government, wearied out with a dispute which was interminable, came to the conclusion that the only way of restoring peace to the Church was to abandon the Council of Chalcedon. In the year 482 was published the famous Henoticon or Pacification of Zeno, in which the Emperor took upon himself to determine a matter of faith. The Henoticon declared that no symbol of faith but that of the Nicene Creed, commonly so called, should be received in the Churches; it anathematized the opposite heresies of Nestorius and Eutyches, and it was silent on the question of the "One" or "Two Natures" after the Incarnation. This middle measure had the various effects which might be anticipated. It united the great body of the Eastern Bishops, who readily relaxed into the vague profession of doctrine from which they had been roused by the authority of St. Leo. All the Eastern Bishops signed this Imperial formulary. But this unanimity of the East was purchased by a breach with the West; for the Popes cut off the communication between Greeks and Latins for thirty-five years. On the other hand, the more zealous Monophysites, disgusted at their leaders for accepting what they considered an unjustifiable compromise, split off from the Eastern Churches, and formed a sect by themselves, which remained without Bishops ( acephali ) for three hundred years, when at length they were received back into the communion of the Catholic Church.

 22.

 Dreary and waste was the condition of the Church, and forlorn her prospects, at the period which we have been reviewing. After the brief triumph which attended the conversion of Constantine, trouble and trial had returned upon her. Her imperial protectors were failing in power or in faith. Strange forms of evil were rising in the distance and were thronging for the conflict. There was but one spot in the whole of Christendom, one voice in the whole Episcopate, to which the faithful turned in hope in that miserable day. In the year 493, in the Pontificate of Gelasius, the whole of the East was in the hands of traitors to Chalcedon, and the whole of the West under the tyranny of the open enemies of Nicæa. Italy was the prey of robbers; mercenary bands had overrun its territory, and barbarians were seizing on its farms and settling in its villas. The peasants were thinned by famine and pestilence; Tuscany might be even said, as Gelasius words it, to contain scarcely a single inhabitant [n. 97 ]. Odoacer was sinking before Theodoric, and the Pope was changing one Arian master for another. And as if one heresy were not enough, Pelagianism was spreading with the connivance of the Bishops in the territory of Picenum. In the North of the dismembered Empire, the Britons had first been infected by Pelagianism, and now were dispossessed by the heathen Saxons. The Armoricans still preserved a witness of Catholicism in the West of Gaul; but Picardy, Champagne, and the neighbouring provinces, where some remnant of its supremacy had been found, had lately submitted to the yet heathen Clovis. The Arian kingdoms of Burgundy in France, and of the Visigoths in Aquitaine and Spain, oppressed a zealous and Catholic clergy, Africa was in still more deplorable condition under the cruel sway of the Vandal Gundamond: the people indeed uncorrupted by the heresy [n. 98 ], but their clergy in exile and their worship suspended. While such was the state of the Latins, what had happened in the East? Acacius, the Patriarch of Constantinople, had secretly taken part against the Council of Chalcedon and was under Papal excommunication. Nearly the whole East had sided with Acacius, and a schism had begun between East and West, which lasted, as I have above stated, for thirty-five years. The Henoticon was in force, and at the Imperial command had been signed by all the Patriarchs and Bishops throughout the Eastern Empire [n. 99 ]. In Armenia the Churches were ripening for the pure Eutychianism which they adopted in the following century; and in Egypt the Acephali, already separated from the Monophysite Patriarch, were extending in the east and west of the country, and preferred the loss of the Episcopal Succession to the reception of the Council of Chalcedon. And while Monophysites or their favourers occupied the Churches of the Eastern Empire, Nestorianism was making progress in the territories beyond it. Barsumas had held the See of Nisibis, Theodore was read in the schools of Persia, and the successive Catholici of Seleucia had abolished Monachism and were secularizing the clergy.

 23.

 If then there is now a form of Christianity such, that it extends throughout the world, though with varying measures of prominence or prosperity in separate places; that it lies under the power of sovereigns and magistrates, in various ways alien to its faith; that flourishing nations and great empires, professing or tolerating the Christian name, lie over against it as antagonists; that schools of philosophy and learning are supporting theories, and following out conclusions, hostile to it, and establishing an exegetical system subversive of its Scriptures; that it has lost whole Churches by schism, and is now opposed by powerful communions once part of itself; that it has been altogether or almost driven from some countries; that in others its line of teachers is overlaid, its flocks oppressed, its Churches occupied, its property held by what may be called a duplicate succession; that in others its members are degenerate and corrupt, and are surpassed in conscientiousness and in virtue, as in gifts of intellect, by the very heretics whom it condemns; that heresies are rife and bishops negligent within its own pale; and that amid its disorders and its fears there is but one Voice for whose decisions the peoples wait with trust, one Name and one See to which they look with hope, and that name Peter, and that see Rome; such a religion is not unlike the Christianity of the fifth and sixth Centuries [n. 100 ].

Notes

 1. De Gubern. Dei, vii. p. 142. Elsewhere, "Apud Aquitanicos quæ civitas in locupletissimâ ac nobilissimâ sui parte non quasi lupanar fuit? Quis potentum ac divitum non in luto libidinis vixit? Haud multum matrona abest à vilitate servarum, ubi paterfamilias ancillarum maritus est? Quis autem Aquitanorum divitum non hoc fuit?" (pp. 134, 135.) "Offenduntur barbari ipsi impuritatibus nostris. Esse inter Gothos non licet scortatorem Gothum; soli inter cos præjudicio nationis ac nominis permittuntur impuri esse Romani" (p. 137). "Quid? Hispanias nonne vel eadem vel majora forsitan vitia perdiderunt? ... Accessit hoc ad manifestandam illic impudicitiæ damnitionem, ut Wandalis potissimum, id est, pudicis barbari, traderentur" (p. 137). Of Africa and Carthage, "In urbe Christianâ, in urbe ecclesiastica, ... viri in semetipsis feminas profitebantur," etc. (p. 152).

 2. Dunham, Hist. Spain, vol. i. p. 112.

 3. Aguirr. Concil. t. 2, p. 191.

 4. Dunham, p. 125.

 5. Hist. Franc. iii. 10.

 6. Ch. 39.

 7. Greg. Dial. iii. 30.

 8. Ibid. 20.

 9. Gibbon, Hist. ch. 37.

 10. De Glor. Mart. i. 25.

 11. Ibid. 80.

 12. Ibid. 79.

 13. Vict. Vit. i. 14.

 14. De Gub D. iv. p. 73.

 15. Ibid. v. p. 88.

 16. Epp. i. 31.

 17. Hist. vi. 23.

 18. Cf. Assem. t. i. p. 351, not. 4, t. 3, p. 393.

 19. Baron. Ann. 432, 47.

 20. Gibbon, Hist. ch. 36.

 21. Baron. Ann. 471, 18.

 22. Vict. Vit. iv. 4.

 23. Vict. Vit. ii. 3-15.

 24. Aguirr. Conc. t. 2, p. 262.

 25. Aguirr. ibid. p. 232.

 26. Theod. Hist. v. 2.

 27. c. Ruff. i. 4.

 28. Ep. 15.

 29. Ep. 16.

 30. Aug. Epp. 43. 7.

 31. Assem. iii. p. 68.

 32. Ibid. t. 3, p. 84, note 3.

 33. Wegnern, Proleg. in Theod. Opp. p. ix.

 34. De Ephrem Syr. p. 61.

 35. Lengerke, de Ephrem. Syr. pp. 73-75.

 36. [ despotou ], vid. La Croze, Thesaur. Ep. t. 3, § 145.

 37. Montf. Coll. Nov. t. 2, p. 227.

 38. Rosenmuller, Hist. Interpr. t. 3, p. 278.

 39. Lengurke, de Ephr. Syr. pp. 165-167.

 40. Ernest. de Proph. Mess. p. 462.

 41. Eccl. Theol. iii. 12.

 42. Professor Lee's Serm. Oct. 1838, pp. 144-152.

 43. Noris. Opp. t. 2, p. 112.

 44. Augusti. Euseb. Em. Opp.

 45. Asseman. Bibl. Or. p. cmxxv.

 46. Hoffman, Gram. Syr. Proleg. § 4.

 47. The educated Persians were also acquainted with Syriac. Assem. t. i. p. 351, not.

 48. Asseman., p. lxx.

 49. Euseb. Præp. vi. 10.

 50. Tillemont, Mem. t. 7, p. 77.

 51. Gibbon, ch. 47.

 52. Asseman. p. lxxviii.

 53. Gibbon, ibid.

 54. Asseman. t. 2, p. 403, t. 3, p. 393.

 55. Asseman. t. 3, p. 67.

 56. Gibbon, ibid.

 57. Assem. p. lxxvi.

 58. Ibid. t. 3, p. 441.

 59. Ch. 47.

 60. Fleur. Hist. xxvii. 29.

 61. Gibbon, ch. 47.

 62. Concil. Hard. t. 2, p. 127.

 63. Petav. de Incarn. iv. 6, § 4.

 64. Concil. Hard. t. 2, p.168.

 65. Vid. the Author's Athan . trans. [ed. 1881, vol. ii. pp. 351-333, 426-429, and on the general subject his Theol. Tracts, art. v.]

 66. Fleury, Oxf. tr. xxvii. 39.

 67. Ibid. 41. In like manner, St. Athanasius in the foregoing age had said, "The faith confessed at Nicæa by the Fathers, according to the Scriptures, is sufficient for the overthrow of all misbelief." ad Epict. init. Elsewhere, however, he explains his statement, "The decrees of Nicæa are right and sufficient for the overthrow of all heresy, especially the Arian." ad. Max. fin. St. Gregory Nazianzen, in like manner, appeals to Nicæa; but he "adds an explanation on the doctrine of the Holy Spirit which was left deficient by the Fathers, because the question had not then been raised." Ep. 102, init. This exclusive maintenance, and yet extension of the Creed, according to the exigences of the times, is instanced in other Fathers. Vid. Athan. tr. [ed. 1881, vol. ii. p. 82.]

 68. Fleury, ibid. 27.

 69. Concil. Hard. t. 2, p. 141. [A negative is omitted in the Greek, but inserted in the Latin.]

 70. Supr. p. 245.

 71. Ad Const. ii. 9. Vid. Athan. tr. [ed. 1881. vol. ii. p. 261.]

 72. Concil. Hard. t. 2, p. 162.

 73. Fleury, Hist. Oxf. tr. xxvii 37.

 74. Ep. 116.

 75. Conc. Hard. t. 2, p. 36.

 76. Ep. 43.

 77. Fleury, Hist. Oxf. tr. xxviii. 17, note l .

 78. Concil. Hard. t. 2, p. 68.

 79. Fleury, Oxf. tr. xxviii. 2, 3.

 80. Ibid. 20.

 81. Conc. Hard. t. 2, p. 656.

 82. [Can any so grave an ex parte charge as this be urged against the recent Vatican Council?]

 83. I cannot find my reference for this fact; the sketch is formed from notes made some years since, though I have now verified them.

 84. Leont. de Sect. v. p 512.

 85. Concil. Hard. t. 2, p. 99, vid. also p. 418.

 86. Renaud. Patr. Alex. p. 115.

 87. Assem. t. 2, pp. 133-137.

 88. Leont. de Sect. vii. pp. 521, 2.

 89. Fac. i. 5, circ. init.

 90. Hodeg. 20, p. 319.

 91. i.e . Arianism in the East: "Sanctiores aures plebis quam corda sunt sacerdotum." S. Hil. contr. Auxent. 6. It requires some research to account for its hold on the barbarians. Vid. supr . pp. 274, 5.

 92. Gibbon, ch. 47.

 93. Assem. t. 2, de Monoph. circ. fin.

 94. Leont. Sect. v. init.

 95. Tillemont, t. 15, p. 784.

 96. Tillemont, Mem. t. 15, pp. 790-811.

 97. Gibbon, Hist. ch. 36, fin.

 98. Gibbon, Hist. ch. 36, fin.

 99. Gibbon, Hist. ch. 47.

 100. [The above sketch has run to great length, yet it is only part of what might be set down in evidence of the wonderful identity of type which characterizes the Catholic Church from first to last. I have confined myself for the most part to her political aspect; but a parallel illustration might be drawn simply from her doctrinal, or from her devotional. As to her devotional aspect, Cardinal Wiseman has shown its identity in the fifth compared with the nineteenth century, in an article of the Dublin Review, quoted in part in Via Media, vol. ii. p. 378. Indeed it is confessed on all hands, as by Middleton, Gibbon, etc., that from the time of Constantine to their own, the system and the phenomena of worship in Christendom, from Moscow to Spain, and from Ireland to Chili, is one and the same. I have myself paralleled Medieval Europe with modern Belgium or Italy, in point of ethical character in " Difficulties of Anglicans," vol. i. Lecture ix., referring the identity to the operation of a principle, insisted on presently, the Supremacy of Faith. And so again, as to the system of Catholic doctrine, the type of the Religion remains the same, because it has developed according to the "analogy of faith," as is observed in Apol ., p. 196, "The idea of the Blessed virgin was, as it were, magnified in the Church of Rome, as time went on, but so were all the Christian ideas, as that of the Blessed Eucharist," etc.]