The Sixth Council closes a crisis of danger to the faith of the Church than which no greater is to be found in all history. The years from 638, in which Honorius died, to 682, in which his successor St. Leo II. approved the doctrinal decision of the Council, and further, allowed the conduct of a predecessor to be condemned, are occupied by ten successors of Honorius, every one of whom with the utmost zeal condemned the heresy which was supported by two emperors, wielding absolute power, and by four successive patriarchs of Constantinople, besides patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch. All these put ecclesiastical authority at the service of these emperors to carry out their will. Heraclius and Constans II. were not theologians, and it required theological skill to construct concerning the Person of our Lord a heresy which could present itself to the fastidious Greek mind, clothed in proper expressions of a language lending itself with unsurpassable accuracy to every variation of thought. Cyrus, made for his first suggestions, by the grateful monarch, patriarch of Alexandria, was so good as to provide Heraclius with doctrinal decrees intended to make the disloyal sects of Egypt believe that they could express their own false doctrine in words which might pass for an assent to the Council of Chalcedon and the doctrine of St. Leo. When the patriarch Sophronius denounced the error and appealed to Rome and Pope Honorius in words which after twelve hundred years sound like a trumpet’s call, Sergius being patriarch of Constantinople, the bosom friend and most trusted counsellor of Heraclius, holding the see of the Golden City for eight and twenty years, living and dying, too, in the greatest renown as an orthodox bishop, approached Pope Honorius with insidious language, totally disguising the real state of things in the East. He wished the Pope to believe that Cyrus of Alexandria was winning the proud and tumultuous sects of Egypt to Catholic union with the doctrine of St. Leo, which Honorius held with the utmost fidelity. Not only did he write letters, but he constructed a document to which he induced the emperor to set the imperial seal and require it to be signed by all bishops, and especially by the bishop of Rome. The document was intended to introduce that heresy formulated by Cyrus, which Sophronius exposed and refuted. Pope Honorius died in October 638, and never saw this document. Sergius got it passed by his Council at Constantinople, but died himself in December of the same year. Pope Severinus was elected to succeed Honorius before the end of the year 638, but his consecration was delayed by Greek intrigues for nineteen months, in the hope of obtaining his assent to the document drawn up by Sergius. This was found to be hopeless. The exarch then contented himself with plundering the Lateran treasury. Pope Severinus was at length consecrated, and sat for two months and six days, in which time however he condemned the Ecthesis.