Such was the position of the Pontiffs before that definitive rejection of the Byzantine sovereign made by Stephen II. when he was left naked to the assault of Aistulf by the cowardice or the impotence of Constantine Kopronymus. From his return in 756 he and his successors after him became kings as well as Popes of Rome. Scrupulous as the two Gregories, Zacharias and Stephen himself had been up to the time of the compact with Pipin, never after did any Pope acknowledge the Byzantine as his civil sovereign. Never could an Italian of those ages have given to the Goth or the Lombard that heartfelt devotion which they felt for the perpetual defender of the Italian people, who was seated in the centre of Italy at once the champion of the Christian faith, and representative of Rome’s old Commonwealth. The Byzantine slave-master revolted the Roman heart; the Arian politician revolted the Christian faith: but in the Roman see St. Sergius the Syrian emulated the courage of St. Martin the Roman, and St. Gregory III., also Syrian, was in no quality behind his predecessor St. Gregory II. the Roman. Is it any wonder that by the end of the seventh century when a Justinian II. tried to repeat on the person of St. Sergius the wickedness practised by his grandfather upon St. Martin, his own soldiers rose against the guardsman whom he had deputed to this atrocious work, and recognized in the Pope the defender of all which they held dear, whether in the natural or the supernatural life. And, again, had not the seven revolutions at Byzantium—ending in the exultation of a rough soldier who was able in the field, but ignorant in doctrine—given a sufficient lesson to the Italian peoples to cast off a force which disregarded all right in the natural order, and the whole tradition of faith in the supernatural realm of revealed truth? That is the consummation which we have been following during a whole generation, from 726 to 756.