Thus the Lateran Council of 649, presided over by Pope Martin, who directs all the proceedings, who informs the emperor of the condemnation of the Typus, composed by this emperor’s own patriarch, and issued by himself as a law, who addresses an encyclical letter to all bishops and their people, summing up its acts, who writes to various provinces, and in particular to the eastern patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem, appointing his vicar over them, gives us in full detail a picture of the discipline existing in the Church just at the middle of the seventh century. As to doctrine, the Lateran Council stands precisely on that set forth two hundred years before at the Council of Chalcedon by the great authority of St. Leo. In condemning the Monothelite heresy, espoused by two emperors and three successive patriarchs of Constantinople, it alleges the tradition of the Fathers from the beginning, and the doctrinal decrees of the five Councils, then accepted as General. During these five centuries the East has been agitated almost without ceasing by the efforts of the Eutychean heresy and its last progeny, the Monothelite, to overthrow the true faith concerning the Incarnation, on which the whole economy of human salvation rests. The eastern patriarchates have utterly failed to secure the occupants of the sees of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople, from the prevailing error. Cyrus, patriarch of Alexandria, and Sergius, patriarch of Constantinople, are the chief patrons of this error. After them, Pyrrhus, and then Paul, are using the utmost power of the emperor from their seat in the capital to impose it by force: and the ecumenical patriarch especially is using it as a lever against the Roman Primacy, and in drawing up decrees of doctrine fathered by the imperial power is practically denying the Roman Primacy to be the guardian of the Christian faith, and striving to transfer that guardianship to himself, always under the wing of the emperor. Had the Popes yielded to the Ecthesis or the Typus, both the faith of the Church would have been altered, and its government transferred from Old Rome to Roma Nova. St. Martin, as the first act of his pontificate, plays this most remarkable part of summoning a Council which defeats this double aggression. And the moment at which it is done may be marked as that in which the temporal weakness of Rome touches its lowest point. The subsequent treatment of the Pope, which I have now to mention, is an incontestable proof how entirely he was exposed to the machinations, the violence, and the despotic tyranny of his enemies, especially to the malevolent union of emperor and patriarch. Yet it is to be observed that neither emperor nor patriarch even affects to deny the authority of St. Peter’s successor; what they attempt to do is to control and subject him in the exercise of it.