But to estimate at its due value this long series of historic facts, it must be remembered that during at least three centuries of this period, the seventy Popes work as captives, the fifty-eight bishops of Constantinople work as the right hand of emperors. From the time indeed when St. Silvester passed from the catacombs to the Lateran palace, to the time when the Vandal robbers desolated Rome under the eyes of St. Leo, the Popes were not captives. They had severe persecution at times to undergo: especially under Constantius I., the whole fifty years of Arian trial were a special test of their fortitude, their clear undoubted maintenance of the Godhead of our Lord, their unfaltering trust in their apostolic right. But so long as there was a Christian western emperor he had a regard to the Apostolic See of the West: even a Valentinian III. could acknowledge St. Leo in an imperial edict in 447 as “Principem episcopalis coronæ”; words which present the very idea of St Peter’s majesty, as the root, the bond, and the crown of the episcopate. But with the inroad of barbarians, as soldiers of fortune and civil masters of Rome, another time begins. And when to barbarous manners and brute force was added the Arian spirit, a period ensued which was calculated to test to the utmost the dowry of truth bestowed on the Apostolic See. Justinian as a civil ruler may be deemed worse than Odoacer, worse even than Theodorich. What the Popes did, they did often after being nominated without free election, often with the postponement of their confirmation after election (as when after the death of Pope Honorius, Pope Severinus had his three years diminished to two months, in the hope of Heraclius to bend him to the Monothelite heresy), sometimes with unjust depositions, as St. Silverius by Theodora, as St. Martin by Constans II., as St. Sergius attempted by Justinian II., as John VI. attempted by Apsimar, the emperor of a day: again by unlawful substitution for a living Pope, as Eugenius to St. Martin, when condemned but not yet martyred. Then again the eleven years preceding the great Pope Sergius from 676 to 687 witness the appointment of six Popes. At this time there is a series of Popes who show eastern lineage, as if the emperor’s hand were busy in the choice of them. But no one of them fails, and St. Sergius and St. Gregory III., both easterns, are of the very greatest and most stedfast in the whole time of Popes. Add to this that the civil condition of these Popes, from the entrance of the Lombards to the end of the exarchs, was often most perilous. It was plaintively alluded to by St. Agatho in addressing the Sixth Council, when forty years after the death of Honorius he set forth in most absolute language the unfaltering integrity of faith which had marked the Apostolic See to his own time, language; which the Council accepted.