It is to be remarked how immovable the Popes were, not only in the maintenance of Christian doctrine pure and proper, but likewise in the maintenance of that relation between the Two Powers which Christian doctrine requires as one of the conditions of its own action in the world. What on this subject Pope Gelasius in the last decade of the fifth century had said to the emperor Anastasius, now after two hundred and thirty years Pope St. Gregory II. was saying to the Iconoclast emperor Leo. In the interval Italy had been governed by the Byzantines, so far as they possessed it, during two centuries as a subject province, the captive of its spear; Rome had lived through it only in virtue of the Pope’s primacy. The eastern empire having been false to the faith in its emperors and in many of its bishops, but especially in four successive patriarchs of Constantinople, had been cut in two, and one half of it given over to an anti-Christian religion to rule with unrestricted violence. And now the diminished emperor, who had just saved his capital from the Mohammedan chalif, had been seduced by Jewish and Mohammedan principles to sweep the Christian churches in his remaining dominion, from Sancta Sophia to the least country church, free of Christian symbols, beginning with the most sacred image of the Redeemer(207) which adorned the gate of his own palace as the witness for the need of the oppressed. Then St. Gregory II. stood up against Leo III. exactly as his predecessor, Pope Gelasius, had resisted the emperor of the former day. Syria and Egypt and North Africa, and, still greater shame and peril, Spain had become Mohammedan. The Pope stood, in 727, where he had stood in 495. In the interval all these countries had fallen: but St. Gregory II. could tell a furious tyrant that all the nations of the West looked to St. Peter as “a god upon earth”—that he could not execute his threat to pull down the statue of St. Peter, which the Christians of that day reverenced in his basilica at Rome, which the Christians of eleven centuries have reverenced since in the same place, and put their head under the Apostle’s foot as the acknowledgment of the dignity with which Christ invested him.