Between the two Gregories twenty-four Popes occupied the throne of St. Peter, from Pope Sabinian to Pope Constantine. Of these three only, Honorius, Vitalian, and Sergius, sat over ten years each; the three together occupied forty-one years, leaving seventy years in the gross for the remaining twenty-one pontificates. But a considerable portion of these years must be deducted for the time which intervened between their election, and the allowing of their consecration by the consent of the emperor or the exarch as his viceroy. In that interval Greek arts were applied, to induce the Pope elect to consent to some thing desired by the emperor. Thus Pope Severinus on the death of Honorius was kept out of his see for nineteen months and sixteen days, to obtain, if possible, his consent to the doctrine put forth by Heraclius in the Ecthesis. In this manner the pontificate of Severinus was reduced to two months and three days, in which he found time to condemn the emperor’s Ecthesis. So again on the election of St. Sergius in 687, the exarch hurried down from Ravenna to prevent it if possible; but he was too late, and could only plunder the Church’s treasury of one hundred pounds weight of gold. These are samples, but the action continued over the whole period. Historians remark that the seven last Popes who sat during it were all Greeks, and conclude that the emperors thought compliance might be hoped for in such cases. This series of seven began with John VI. in 685. The seven Popes were all faithful not to the exacting demands of emperors, but to the charge of St. Peter, and during the thirty years in which they occupied the Holy See seven revolutions of emperors took place at Constantinople. Three emperors perished by public execution; a fourth was only blinded; a fifth having become a priest, and attempted to regain the throne was then executed as a traitor by its actual tenant. The worst of the six was the fifth emperor in the line of Heraclius, whose head was sent to Rome as a ghastly but indisputable witness that Italy was delivered from his tyranny. During the whole one hundred and eleven years Italy was governed as a province which had no civil rights. I recur to the words of St. Agatho in his letter(162) to the Sixth Council for the importance of his acknowledging the sad condition of learning, as a result of the miserable danger and uncertainty of the time. Not often does a Pope say of his own legates, “How should they who gained their daily bread by manual labour with the utmost hazard, possess accurate and abundant learning?” But he gave assurance that “with simplicity of heart and without faltering they maintained the faith handed down from their fathers, making their one and their chief good that nothing should be diminished, nothing changed, but the words and the meaning both kept untouched”.