conscience in giving sanction to his master’s impieties. This degradation by Kopronymus of the man whom he had made and called ecumenical patriarch, and to make him had persisted in his father’s overthrow of the Church’s order from the beginning, by an act of despotic power breaking into her constitution, is it not also a token of the condition into which the most ruthless tyranny had reduced the episcopate of that eastern realm? Those bishops who, at the bidding of an adventurer, successful for the moment and presently swept away, had met at Constantinople in 710 to overthrow the Sixth Council and the faith of the Church; and again, the three hundred and thirty-eight who had met at the same place at the bidding of Kopronymus to make the whole order of divine worship subject to his will, did the spirit of St. Basil, St. Athanasius, St. Chrysostom, St. Cyril of Alexandria live in them still, or were they in possession indeed of unquestioned episcopal rank and all the powers which belong to consecration, but in fact the most abject minions of the most debased human will—the will of a Byzantine despot? The will of one fined already of one half his empire by the divine Hand which raised up the most abject of savages to punish a debased Christian realm. Yet ruler after ruler had not received the lesson which faith derives from chastisement. Leo III. surpassed his predecessors, and his son surpassed the father, in imitating the arrogance of a false theocracy. He carried his civil autocracy into interference with the doctrine and the worship of the Church. This interference the laws of his own empire warned him against, as cited by St. Gregory II. in the examples of the greatest emperors. It is not too much to say that the despotism wielded by those who occupied the Byzantine throne from Justinian to Kopronymus had eaten out the courage and dulled the sense of divine things which we admire in the Fathers of the fourth century. Athanasius denounced a Constantius, and Basil a Valens, but the eastern bishops of the eighth century crouched before Leo and Kopronymus, and if there had not been a succession of Popes, in whom the spirit of St. Leo lived on, and the doctrine of St. Leo was maintained, the Church herself would have yielded to the most debasing despotism ever seen. But it must not be forgotten that the bishops of the West were faithful to the teaching and emulated the stedfastness of the Popes. A despotic patriarch, nominee and instrument of a despotic emperor, made a servile episcopate. A martyr Pope, such as St. Martin, likewise made an army of martyrs. The several character of bishops in the East and West completes the contrast which we have been drawing out.