Although not _vestments_ in the strictest sense of the word, we must not conclude this chapter without a brief notice of the two exclusively episcopal insignia noticed in the canons of the fourth council of Toledo, namely, the ring and staff. Rings have been found in the tombs of bishops of the third century. This, however, proves nothing, as their use was universal among both Christians and heathen. Nor can anything definitely ecclesiastical be tortured out of the many descriptive notices which have come down to us of the rings in the possession of individual bishops of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries. Isidore of Seville (_circa_ 600) lands us on firmer ground; he distinctly says: 'To the bishop at his consecration is given a staff ... a ring likewise is given him to signify pontifical honour, or as a seal for secret things.'[45] We need not, perhaps, discuss the esoteric meaning of the gift as here set forth; but the fact clearly remains that by Isidore's time the gift of a ring and a staff had become an essential part of the ceremony of episcopal ordination. The Toletan canon tells us the same thing. Before that time there is no clear indication of the gift; it is not mentioned in ordination services of earlier date than the sixth century, one of the oldest references to it being in the sacramentary of Gregory the Great (_circa_ 590 A.D.); and even this passage is rejected as an interpolation by Migne.[46] _The Pastoral Staff._—Isidore says, in the passage already quoted, that the staff is given 'that he may rule or correct those set under him, or support the weakness of the weak.'[47] It is strange that even the pastoral staff has a prototype among the insignia of the heathen priesthood. One of the emblems of the Roman augurs was a _lituus_, or crook, resembling almost exactly the earliest pastoral staves as we find them shown in the monuments of early Christian art. It was used _inter alia_ for dividing the sky into regions for astrological purposes. The pastoral staff, as represented in early monuments, was much shorter than the mediaeval crozier; and it seems not at all improbable that the pastoral staff was originally a 'Christianization' of this pagan implement. Other writers have argued in favour of the pastoral staff being simply an adaptation of the common walking-sticks, which were certainly used in churches as a support before the introduction of seats. It has been pointed out, however, that the pastoral staff had become a special member of the insignia of a bishop before the general abolition of these crutches; and this, it must be confessed, is an argument of considerable force against such a hypothesis.