The fourth attempt is made by Heraclius at the end of his long reign, when he had fallen under the influence of Sergius, as his predecessor, Zeno, had fallen under the influence of Acacius. Not only did Sergius hold the great see of the capital during twenty-eight years from 610 to 638, but things recorded of him seem to indicate that he was a man of extraordinary resolution. He had preserved Heraclius from deserting his capital, and flying back for refuge to his father at Carthage, after a long series of defeats from the Persians. He had acted as guardian of his son, and administrator of the empire during the marvellous six years when Heraclius, shaking off twelve years of apathy, and going forth in the name of God, and in publicly uttered commendation of his kingdom to the Blessed Mother of God, had triumphed over the Great King. Servius finally supplied him with the exposition, which was to present in seeming concord the wrangling episcopacy of his eastern empire, and overcome the Roman Pontiff in his maintenance of the faith. The fifth attempt was made by Constans II., grandson of Heraclius, for whom Paul II., patriarch of Constantinople, invested his heresy in fitting language, and presented it in the Typus as an imperial decree which all were to accept under punishment to property, freedom, or life. And Pope Martin I. had to fight the old battle of the Church as a subject to a sovereign who was at once without mercy and without scruple. The Typus is the perfect specimen of the theologising emperor, who begins by attributing to himself the charge over the whole Church, and puts himself precisely in the place of the Pope and the bishops in formulating the true Christian doctrine, wherein he claims the initiative, and the ultimate decision. It need only be added that in all this succession of attempts to deprive the Church of God of her liberty, and the Pope of that guardianship of the faith which alone is adequate to its maintenance, the successors of Constantine departed essentially from the position which the first of Christian emperors took at the first General Council. He did not sit in that Council. He placed himself with the sword of empire at the entrance to guard the approach. He made the decrees of the Council laws of the Roman empire; but he acknowledged that the power to make them rested in the bishops alone.