In the meantime Pope Agatho had died on the 10th January, 681. The see remained vacant eighteen months, during which the Council ended. Leo II. was consecrated the 17th August, 682, and his short pontificate ended the 3rd July, 683. To him the letter of the emperor was carried, and he discharged the office of confirming this Council, as St. Leo had confirmed that of Chalcedon, and of bringing it to the knowledge of the West. The letter to the emperor, in which Leo II. confirms the Sixth Council, is a document extending over nearly six folio columns.(129) It shows throughout the Pope’s great anxiety for the exact maintenance of the faith, and how severe had been the struggle with the heresy which had been upheld by two emperors and by four successive patriarchs of the imperial city. The Pope draws out in it a creed of the utmost minuteness in regard of the contested doctrine, the Person of our Lord in His Two Natures. He repeats his acknowledgment of the Five preceding General Councils as handing down one continuous doctrine from the beginning, and joins with them the Council just held as witness of the same doctrine; and he likewise joins the heretics during several hundred years from Arius, in one anathema, which closes with the inventors of this new error—that is, “Theodore, Bishop of Pharan, Cyrus of Alexandria, Sergius, Pyrrhus, Paul, and Peter, who lurked like thieves in the See of Constantinople rather than sat as guides;(130) nay, and also Honorius, who did not set himself to hallow this Apostolic Church by the teaching of the apostolic tradition, but allowed it, being spotless, to be stained by a profane betrayal”. These words, by which St. Leo expressed how far he assented to the condemnation of Honorius by the Council, have a light thrown upon them by the words which he used in making known the condemnation of the Monothelites to the Spanish bishops, when among the condemned he included Honorius, “who did not extinguish the flame of heretical doctrine when it first arose, as was the office of the apostolic authority, but by neglecting fostered it”.(131) And, again, in announcing the confirmation of the Council to the Spanish king, Erwig, he says of Honorius, “who allowed the spotless rule of the apostolic tradition, which he had received from his predecessors, to be stained”.(132)