guarded jealously the last remains of imperial grandeur. He at least was a king in Italian Ravenna and Verona, and Rome was both great and dear to him. But Justinian and those who followed him were task-masters on the Bosphorus, who placed a tax-collector at Ravenna to wring out the last drop of Italy’s blood, and plunder, as occasion served, the treasury of the Church in the Pope’s Lateran Patriarcheion. In what consisted the power by which twenty-nine Popes from Pelagius I. in 555, to Gregory II. in 715 bore so fearful a strain? Solely in one thing: in the belief that the throne of St. Peter had been fixed at Rome, and that St. Peter had received by a direct gift from Christ, and his successor had inherited, the charge to feed and govern the universal Church. The five times captured Rome lived on in this belief, and was become the city of the Popes. The eye of a conqueror, legislator and ruler, had chosen with a wisdom which all posterity has acknowledged the fairest and the strongest of cities for the seat of his power. He made it a royal residence; he could not make it an apostolic see. When at length his city fell, the empire fell with it. In the day of its pride it sought to trample on the elder Rome by the privileges of new Rome. The second of these attempts was foiled by the ten successors of Pope Honorius. The danger to the Christian faith in these fifty years which begin, it is to be noted, at the death of Mohammed and the election of a chalif in his stead, has been touched upon; but the danger to the empire must not be dissociated from it. All the tyranny, the extortion, the spiritual encroachment of the empire could not sever the links which bound it to the Church. Heraclius had been warned by his former minister Maximus how perilous to his empire his meddling with the creed would be.(136) “It is not a time for such things,” he said. “It is a time of blood on account of our sins, not of theologising; a time of lamentation, a time of imploring God’s mercy, not of sophistical contradiction, moving Him to greater indignation.” The Greek(137) chronographer in the ninth century marks the rise of the Arabian enemy as a scourge of Christian sins. He traces the whole calamitous series of events to the seduction of Heraclius, by a certain Athanasius, full of native Syrian guile, whom he promised to make and did afterwards make patriarch of Antioch: Heraclius was confused by his use of new terms. He consulted Sergius, and also Cyrus, then bishop of Phasis. He found the three agree. He followed them. He translated Cyrus from Phasis to Alexandria. Then Heraclius issued an imperial edict on doctrine. When Constans had succeeded as emperor another imperial edict on doctrine, drawn up by another bishop of Constantinople, appeared, which St. Martin condemned in his Council at Rome. Then the emperor Constans, full of wrath, carried St. Martin and St. Maximus to Constantinople, tortured them and banished them to the Chersonese, and punished many of