Of all the early Popes, save Leo I and Gregory I, it is true that we may be tolerably at home in the history of their times without knowing much about them. No Pope is ranked among the leading Western Fathers. The only considerable theologian who occupied the Holy See, before the year 1000, is Gregory I; and the highest praise which we can give his writings is that they imparted new life to some ideas of St. Augustine. It is as statesmen, not as thinkers, that the early Popes appeal to our attention. Yet their practical achievements scarcely account for the reverence which they inspired. The one great mission which Rome set on foot was that of Augustine to England. The other evangelists of the Dark Ages found their inspiration elsewhere, in the monasteries of Ireland or of Gaul and Germany. If we consider the progress of theological science, and of ecclesiastical organisation, we find that the great controversies were resolved, and the great legislative assemblies convened, in the Eastern Empire. It was but rarely that Rome asserted her right to speak in the name even of the Western Church; the record of the early Popes who attained to such a momentary pre-eminence was not such as the West could recollect with satisfaction. In fact, it was due to other causes than the merits of individual Popes that Rome became and remained the religious metropolis of Europe. How, then, are we to account for her triumphant progress? Hobbes suggested one explanation when he called the Papacy "the ghost of the Roman Empire." And it is true that the later Emperors found it convenient to confer special privileges on the bishops of their ancient capital. But they adopted this policy too late, when reverence for the Empire was already declining in the West. By imperial grants the Papacy gained no substantial powers, while individual Popes lost credit and independence by their special connection with the New Rome on the Bosporus. They were compelled to play an ignominious part in the squabbles of the Eastern Churches, they were loaded with onerous secular duties; they became the emblems and the agents of an alien tyranny, mistrusted alike by the barbarian invaders and the nominal subjects of the Empire.