And through all they had the great sermons of Leo, strong against all despondency, firm against all yielding to the enemy as Aquileia herself, with the bracing force as of the north wind through them. Their Roman reticence and brevity made them a rock of strength amidst the floods of dread and suspense surging through every heart; they seemed not so much words as the sympathetic sustaining grasp of a strong hand. And from Damaris Ethne learned how those powerful words were the tried weapons of a warrior who had proved them on many battle-fields with many foes, of a commander who by them had many a time rallied the wavering forces of the Church. On two great campaigns Damaris dwelt, especially the first—the warfare which had ended in the victory of Chalcedon. Damaris told the story how the great letter of Leo, called the “Tome,” was planted as a battering-ram against the heresies of the Latrocinium, the “robber-council” of Ephesus; the letter addressed to the Council through the good Bishop Flavian of Constantinople, which he was never suffered to read, the letter being drowned in the furious cries of the heretics, who with fierce blows and buffetings actually did Bishop Flavian himself to death. But that defeat, she said, had been repaired by the victory of the ancient Catholic faith at Chalcedon, on the Asiatic shore opposite Constantinople. The great Council assembled there enthusiastically welcomed Leo’s letter, and cried with one voice—“This we all believe! Peter has spoken by Leo! This is the true faith! This is the faith of the Fathers.” And with the story of that battle was linked a touch of tender feeling, the only record left of Leo’s having shed tears. The Empress Placidia wrote from Rome to her niece the Empress Pulcheria at Constantinople, that when Leo was imploring her to bring about the assembling of the great Council of Chalcedon to reverse the fatal decision of Ephesus, so full was his heart of the truth he was defending, that “he could scarcely speak for tears.” The second campaign of which Damaris told the story was that with the Manicheans, in their two divisions of false asceticism and false freedom. These battles he fought in Rome, upholding against the ascetics, who crept about with sad countenances and sordid garments, the truth that “every creature of God is good, and to be enjoyed with thanksgiving;” on the other hand, contending against the licentious, who, declaring the body to be essentially evil, regarded whatever evil was done by it as indifferent, and thus fell into frightful depths of cruelty and impurity, and repressing them with resolute severity, or driving them from the city they polluted, as those smitten with a malignant or infectious disease.